Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
I’m just surviving the latest windows update that I did not as for, agree to or want.
Fuck Microsoft! My otherwise fast computer is barely crawling, super slow, unresponsive. I can move the mouse but not much else. God fuck that company so good it never comes back up! Please! And free Ukraine… And free Gaza.
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn’t go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don’t see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don’t click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don’t measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we’ll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It’s the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the “learn more” websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That’s a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it’s hard to prove.
It’s also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that’s the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it’s also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I’d be surprised if it was as simple as “people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason”.
Execs: what can we do?!
Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11… That’ll get em flocking! People love ads!
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me “but we are actually HELPING them, we’re showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes”. Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I’m sure our users are loving it!
More AI in the start menu!
Ads will continue till the users fall in love with ads
Regardless of OS, I’d like to see actual user numbers with stats like this because a percentage oversimplifies the landscape.
Have people moved away from (uninstalled) Windows 11 or have people just bought computers with a different OS/older version of Windows on it. To me, these tell a different tale.
Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I’m thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?
Every other version of Windows. It’s practically a law of nature at this point.
XP was terrible until sp2 and in fact so insecure that people all over the world got infected by all kinds of shit.
People forgot or are too young to remember, but XP needed several “service packs” before it was good.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
FIS👏CAL👏CLIFF👏
TBH part of the problem is that Microsoft’s revenue is only 12% from Windows, and I imagine its profit is lower because it involves a lot of maintaining like antivirus and hardware compatibility than some of their other products.
Basically, they can afford to fuck around with Windows OS and still expect to beat quarterly projections (which they did, again.)
Nice picture. Really wild to think that search advertisements (only Bing?) is only 2% under Xbox/gaming related, considering they own so many studios now. Also surprising that the gaming segment is so small
You gotta think that with all of the world’s resource procurement, logistics, manufacturing, distribution, sales, financing, and metrics for every employee and wages, and every outcome compared to every projection, the use of computers is so much bigger than a couple of rich countries with a limited demographic playing video games. If anything, 8% is kind of impressive.
😕
