Windows 10 hits a worrying wobble as growth stalls

Windows 10 has hit a dodgy patch looking at some of the latest figures on the uptake of the operating system, both in general terms and with the stats provided by the US government that throw light on business adoption.

Netmarketshare's figures for April show that Windows 10 has reached an OS market share of 14.35%, but that's a worryingly minimal increase over the previous month where Redmond's newest operating system stood at 14.15%.

In other words, that's a mere 0.2% gain in comparison to the 1.33% rise which was witnessed in March. February also saw an increase of almost 1%, so the latest result is a definite slump. Naturally, Windows 7 is still well in the lead on 48.79%, with Windows XP remaining in third place on 9.66%, half a percentage point ahead of Windows 8.1.

Another set of figures from the US government's analytics service, that monitors the operating systems which are visiting government websites, as spotted by the Register, show that Windows 10 has reached a much more generous 21.82% – although naturally that's still well behind Windows 7 on 61.3%.

The interesting thing about these figures is that they also break down OS usage on a daily basis over the last three months, and over the past month or so there's not been much of a rise during weekdays, while there have been decent gains made at the weekend.

Of course, the theory is that weekday usage reflects business adoption (during the working week), and so it would seem that Microsoft's newest OS is faltering somewhat in this arena, as well.

Slow burn

Business adoption is always going to be something of a slow burn, though, and will likely pick up towards the end of the year as plans for company-wide upgrades – which obviously take a long time to implement – start to kick in.

On the consumer front too, this is likely to be the lull before the storm, as Windows 7/8.1 users now have only a few months left to move before the free Windows 10 upgrade offer expires. So come June and particularly July we're likely to see a rush of users finally jumping off the fence and making the upgrade decision they've been putting off.

Even so, these particular statistics for this month are worryingly wobbly.

• Also check out: Should you upgrade to Windows 10?