Within a year, OEMs will only be able to ship PCs with Windows 10.
Windows 10 market share isn’t for sure what Microsoft expected at this point. With a 7.94 percent (6.63% on Sept’15), it’s a little disappointing that Windows XP systems are still far from W10 with a 11.68 percent.
The free update from Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 seems not enough for those users with legitimate copies of those versions. What’s wrong? There are several reasons that could lead to that decision:
- No perception of advantages: people don’t see the benefit of the upgrade, even though Windows 10 is in many aspects the most ambitious OS from Microsoft. People probably don’t care about the ‘One Windows’ paradigm, but they will (without noticing) soon enough.
- Fear to break something: inexperienced users probably don’t understand what is the update process even though Microsoft gives some good help on this. Maybe they insist too much on the update, though.
- Resistance to change: that’s probably the main reason for users. The ‘If ain’t broke, don’t fix it‘ argument has been the cornerstone for Windows XP users for years. That operating system continues to be good enough for hundreds of millions of users around the world even though there are no security updates anymore.
There’s no easy way to fix this, but stopping the availability of PCs and laptops based on Windows 7 (and 8/8.1) will probably help. Mandatory updates aren’t an option, and I guess only a radical redesign of the operating system -people do judge a book by its cover- would have helped that transition.
Update: The radical redesign I’m talking about would be in line with what for example happened with iOS 7 (fastest adoption rate in iOS history) or with Android 5.0 Lollipop and the new Material Design. There were many other features on both upgrades, but the new interface was clearly one of the things that attracted users the most.
Source: OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016
