What you need to know
- Since its October 2021 release, Windows 11 has been gaining more and more of a foothold in the PC space.
- As of January 2022, it's now up to over 16% in market share based on survey results gathered by AdDuplex.
- In related news, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 is the highest quality Windows it's ever shipped.
AdDuplex has been keeping tabs on approximately 60,000 PCs for a few months now in order to report on how much growth Windows 11 is managing. It's gone from over 1% market share before the operating system's official October 25, 2021 release to a whopping 16.5% as of January 2022.
According to the report, that 16.5% figure is broken up as such: 16.1% of PCs surveyed were on normal Windows 11, while 0.4% were on the Insider track. Meanwhile, the remaining 83.5% of computers stayed with various iterations of Windows 10. You can see the granular breakdown over at AdDuplex's writeup.
"While Windows 11 has almost doubled its share, Windows 10 21H2 more than tripled in the same period," says AdDuplex. "As many older PCs can't upgrade to Windows 11, it will be interesting to see where these numbers settle over time."
The survey doesn't provide details on the motivations for the market share shifts, though it's natural for newer Windows variants to overtake older ones because individuals and organizations want to keep their technology relevant. There are outliers to this general truth, however, as evidenced by the staying power of Windows XP.
There is a chance the upgrades are also being spurred by Windows 11's general quality bar, which, according to Microsoft, has seen "the highest quality scores and product satisfaction of any version of Windows we've ever shipped."
