Windows 11 continues to creep up behind Windows 10

Dark alley and a brick in a sock required to accelerate market share growth?

With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months.

Figures compiled by StatCounter show that Windows 11 commanded a 35.55 percent share of the desktop Windows market in October. In comparison, the share of Windows 10 dropped to 60.97 percent, continuing a downward trend that began earlier this year – it was still at 69.9 percent in April.

Unless there is some marked acceleration, Windows 11 is unlikely to dominate the market by the time Microsoft pulls the plug on free updates for most of the Windows 10 world on October 14, 2025.

Last week, Microsoft put a price – $30 – on keeping security updates flowing for another year for Win 10 consumers. Enterprises can expect to pay $61 per device, while users in the education sector will only need to cough up $1 for the first year.

Although Microsoft will welcome the increase in Windows 11 market share, its determination that many Windows 10 installations will hit the end of support next year has attracted ire from campaigners. The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which delivered a petition to Microsoft in 2023 calling on the Windows giant to reconsider, said the plan to extend the life of the operating system, via extended support, "doesn't go far enough."

"It's outrageous that Microsoft, while touting its environmental credentials, is planning to effectively trash 400 million working computers," said Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG's Designed to Last Campaign Director. "This isn't just environmentally harmful. It's a blatant disregard for consumers who are being forced to replace functional devices."

The Windows 11 experience has also not gone entirely to plan for users who do have hardware that is able to accept the update.

At the start of this year, then Windows Advertising and Web Services boss Mikhail Parakhin agreed that parts of the Windows 11 experience were somewhat subpar and pledged to "make Start menu great again." Parakhin subsequently departed Microsoft and is now CTO at Shopify.

Microsoft has continued to update Windows 11 as time has passed. The most recent release, 24H2, includes several changes such as Rust in the Windows kernel, support for SHA-3, and Sudo for Windows. However, it refuses to address the issue of older hardware being blocked from running the operating system.

In January 2019, a year before the end of support for Windows 7, Windows 10 was comfortably ahead in market share, at 53.18 percent versus 35.05 percent. Windows 11 still has some way to go before it reaches the same point. ®