Windows 10 is now just over six months old and in that time, Microsoft have broken a few records, just in the first few days since is was released the adoption rate greatly surpassed Windows 8 when it was announced back in 2012. Now this week, Windows 10 has just overtaken the ancient Windows XP in terms of usage figures, according to Net Applications. As of writing Windows 10 is now on 11.85% of all desktops while Windows XP is sitting on a decline 11.42%.

If Microsoft want to achieve the ambitious goal of having Windows 10 on a billion devices it has some ways to go yet as Windows 7 is still on 52.47% of all computers worldwide. Also StatCounter have just revealed the figures for January and 2016 so far has been good for Windows 10, it argues that it is on 13.7% of all machines, Windows 8.1 on 11.7% and Windows XP on 8%.

Why is Windows 7 still being used?

The near seven year old operating system was introduced back in 2009, that is a long time in technology and yet people still seem to be using it. At the time when Windows 7 went on sale, Microsoft introduced some clever marketing with the “Windows 7 was my idea” campaign and in all reality it was a hundred times better than the outgoing Windows Vista… so, say no more. But generally Windows 7 is just liked my a lot of people, users are familiar with the glass effect design and it has had time to mature and is a rock solid operating system. Also Microsoft have had all that time to squish out all the bugs out. Also a lot of people didn’t want to go through the hassle of updating their machine to Windows 8 and it cost money, for some people that’s a big barrier. I think with Windows 10, Microsoft made one huge mistake by consistently bombarding users into downloading something and on the flip side, they did more things right by bringing back the start menu, integrating Xbox Live game streaming and more.

Just give it time to be honed and more people will use it.