Windows 10 certainly hasn’t been without its controversies, and we’ve heard somewhat conflicting reports about how well it’s gone down in terms of business adoption – although a new piece of research is claiming that Microsoft’s newest operating system is not proving popular with American companies.
This news comes from Softchoice, which took data from its TechCheck IT asset management service pertaining to 169 firms in the US running over 400,000 Windows machines – finding that only 0.75% of these were using Windows 10. Yep, not even a full percentage point…
So what version of Windows are businesses running? You won’t be surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of organisations are still using Windows 7 – in fact 91% of the business PCs involved in this study.
And perhaps most interestingly, that’s actually a big increase compared to the same period which was evaluated last year – the figure is up 18% on 2015.
Lagging behind Windows 8 and XP
Even Windows 8 is outdoing Microsoft’s latest OS according to this data, as it has captured 4% of the market. Mind you, worryingly, that’s still less than Windows XP which is on 5% of machines despite being woefully out of date in terms of security and support.
The firm noted that larger enterprises were the worst offenders in terms of still being stuck on Windows XP.
Craig McQueen, Director of the Microsoft Practice at Softchoice, commented: “It seems businesses don’t see an urgent need to move operating systems, so long as their cloud-based applications are still running fine on Windows 7. In addition to the security benefits, I think once organisations grasp the user benefits – such as touch and Cortana – we will start to see a boost in adoption [of Windows 10].”
Under 1% seems a worryingly low figure for Windows 10 adoption, but of course this is just one set of figures. We’ve previously seen stats which indicate that W10 is making good ground with businesses, and even if companies haven’t made the move yet, research earlier this month indicated that they’re planning to do so.
Of course, migrating an entire fleet of PCs or laptops to a new OS is far from a trivial endeavour.
Source: techradar.com
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Microsoft never expected Windows 10 to be popular in businesses only a year after release.
IT departments have always moved very slowly and most only finished deploying Windows 7 two years ago.
Microsoft are playing the long game. It's a matter of when not if will businesses upgrade to Windows 10.