This has not been a good few weeks for Microsoft. Fresh from the Recall recoil, CrowdStrike struck, with various ups and downs with Copilot momentum in between. But the constant throughout has been an impending security nightmare for the vast majority of its Windows users, now just months away.
We’re talking Windows 10, of course, and the staggeringly painful campaign to warn hundreds of millions of holdouts that they need to upgrade to Windows 11. Back in June, I reported on the latest Microsoft nag—a full-screen warning that “end of support for Windows arrives on October 14, 2025; this means your desktop won’t receive technical support or security updates after that date.”
Maybe, just maybe, users are now starting to listen—albeit not enough, not nearly fast enough. As Windows specialist Neowin has just reported, “in July 2024, Windows 11 hit an important milestone: for the first time since its launch in October 2021, the operating system crossed the 30% market share mark.” Just. With the latest stats from Statcounter showing better than 7% year-over-year growth for Windows 11.
But that means that more than twice as many Microsoft Windows users are still not using Windows 11 than those that are. Even now. Three-years post launch.
Window 11 isn’t at all new, and all those converts and non-converts know its pros and cons; so setting aside a Copilot AI-driven boost, the question is whether this is a trend or a blip. Certainly, when you look at Statcounter’s Windows 10 chart decline over the last year (above), the line chart is not something you could ski down. Similarly, Windows 11 growth is an easy stroll up a gently slope, to put it mildly.
And so, while it’s clearly good news that there’s some movement, the reality looks worrying. There will be some accelerated shifting to Windows 11 in the coming months ahead of their October 2025 end-of-life, and there will be some companies and home users (when it’s available) taking up extended paid support. But there will also be many millions of users coming off support and taking the risk. With plenty of headlines fueling the reluctance, this problem isn’t going away (1,2,3).
Given the experience of recent weeks, with those global images of blue screens of death all around, come next October, this could be a hackers’ paradise for some time at least. The other factor that will play will be bad actors taking advantage of the bad situation and mailing out scam after scam to target worried Windows 10 users.
Expect to see plenty of that through 2025.
