Re: Falling Windows Market Share

On Jun 24, 2025 at 6:19:23 PM EDT, "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid>
wrote:

Ed Bott
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanished-in-3-years-where-did-they-all-go/>
has noticed an interesting signal in among all the noise of
Microsoft’s PR boasts: the installed base of Microsoft Windows has
been shrinking, and quite substantially.
 
As recently as 3 years ago, Microsoft trumpeted an installed base of
1.4 billion Windows PCs; but the best it can say today is “over a
billion”.
 
So somewhere around 300 million machines have disappeared from that
count in that period. Were they all retired? Or were a few of them
switched to some other OS?

This is a well-known fact and has been going on for about 10+ years.  Many
users are switching to Macs, and Linux has had good growth too. 

<https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america>

These are U.S. stats. 20 years ago, the numbers were Windows 95%, Macs 4% and
Linux 1%.  Now it is Windows 64%, Macs 24%, Linux and ChromeOS both
approaching 5%.

The above site is a wealth of info, broken down by many categories and
regions.