Businesses Make the Move to Windows 10

Since the July 29 release of its latest operating system, Microsoft reports that Windows 10 installs have climbed from 14 million on day one to 110 million as of October 6. Business PCs account for 8 million of those activations, a Microsoft blog post states.

The newest figures put the company well on its way toward reaching its goal of 1 billion Windows 10 upgrades in two to three years; they also indicate that the operating system has achieved early corporate buy-in, a critical factor in its success.

According to a Spiceworks analysis of anonymous Microsoft data, Windows 10 has a business penetration rate of 11 percent after 10 weeks on the market. That’s a strong start for the new OS; its penetration rate is almost 20 percent higher than that of Windows 8 when it was launched three years ago, Spiceworks states.

Diving deeper into the data, Spiceworks found that North American businesses are adopting Windows 10 the fastest, at 12 percent penetration. Businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have a penetration rate of 10.6 percent, while Latin American companies stand at 9.4 percent and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region trail at 8.5 percent.

Larger companies are also hopping on board more quickly. According to Spiceworks, only 5.3 percent of companies with fewer than 50 employees are running Windows 10. Approximately 23 percent of businesses with more than 500 employees have adopted the OS.

Although the Windows 10 upgrade is free for a year for Windows 7 and 8.1 customers, many remaining businesses seem content to take a wait-and-see approach. But slow enterprise adoption was not unexpected.

According to a Spiceworks survey released the month before the Windows 10 launch, 5 percent of IT professionals said their organizations planned to upgrade immediately and an additional 35 percent said they would do so within the first year. Another 33 percent said they’d make the move to Windows 10 by the end of year two.

For Spiceworks blogger Peter Tsai, those early estimates make the current 11 percent penetration rate for businesses all the more impressive. He elaborates further on the operating system’s success:

At this point, Windows 10 is also the most quickly adopted Windows operating system ever. It took Redmond approximately 6 months to sell 100 million licenses for both Windows 7 and Windows 8. Win10 has eclipsed them both in less than half the time.