Home / Software & Gaming / Operating Systems / Microsoft Windows 10 to be as popular as Windows 7 – analyst

Microsoft Windows 10 to be as popular as Windows 7 – analyst

The adoption of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 8 operating system has been generally slow because it looks and feels unfamiliar to most users. Windows 10 operating system promises to become more popular because Microsoft will attempt to make it more familiar to users of classic Windows operating systems. A financial analyst said that Windows 10 could be as popular as Windows 7.

Intel Corp. has suggested that as many as 600 million personal computers could be replaced with PCs powered by Windows 10 operating system in the foreseeable future. Microsoft itself said that Windows 10 will be used on billions of devices. While it is unknown precisely how Microsoft plans to monetize its next-generation operating system, Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest, believes that Microsoft’s licensing revenues will be significantly higher in the coming years.

“Microsoft saw relatively weak adoption of Windows 8, but early reviews are encouraging for Windows 10,” said Mr. Barnicle in a note to clients, reports Tech Trader Daily. “The Windows 10 upgrade cycle could be like Windows 7. While we believe it will not be as strong an upgrade cycle as the XP expiration cycle, Windows 10 could provide upside to our F2016 D&C licensing revenue estimates, which are currently modeled to be flat.”

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Since Windows 10 operating system will work on personal computers, tablets, smartphones and even wearables, the OS will be sold at different price-points. It is likely that average revenue per copy will be lower than average revenue a Windows license brings to Microsoft today. As a result, to benefit from Windows 10, Microsoft will just have to sell higher amount of copies than it did with Windows 8.

There are multiple ways for Microsoft to monetize its operating systems. The main challenge for Windows 10 will be to persuade makers of smartphones, tablets and wearables to use the platform in general. So far, Microsoft has not been very successful on the market of mobile devices and has consistently lost market share to Google Android. It is not guaranteed that Microsoft manages to capture share from Android and Android Wear in the future.

Microsoft will release Windows 10 operating system next fall.

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KitGuru Says: It is noteworthy that financial analysts these days do not try to assess success of Windows 10 outside the personal computer world. Given that PC makers need Windows for their systems, it is nearly certain that Windows 10 will remain rather popular on the market of desktops and notebooks. But the key to success of Windows 10 ecosystem lies outside the PC world. Microsoft needs to install Windows on mobile and ultra-mobile devices, not only on PCs, to remain relevant.

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22 comments

  1. It is quite patronising to explain the poor/slow adoption of 8 as “because it looks and feels unfamiliar to most users.” There are many, many, reasons why people don’t like Windows 8, and they’re mostly good.

  2. Please name 3.

  3. John Iyney Iye Slade

    agree, i want a computer not some dumbphone fat fingered app OS please thank you please.

    Maybe if things worked properly it would be more attractive – but even as a mostly-competent PC user capable of building my own rig etc, when i gave it a test run it i got pretty fed up with having to trawl for solutions to get things working……with nearly everything i wanted to use – i can’t imagine how the typical layman laptop user would feel although granted they are probably not as in-depth/niche in their use.

    After the vista debacle (windows 7 live beta!), now that the live beta for w10 is nearly up, i’ll wait for that before my next oh so fun troubleshooting saga…

    😉

  4. I have no clue what you’re talking about… I build my own desktop PCs as well, and have had zero issues getting them to run with Windows 8. I also have no issues getting around the desktop interface with Windows 8 – in fact I find it is much easier to do advanced tasks with Windows 8 than it was with Windows 7.

  5. 1) Mouse and keys compatibility.
    2) Metro screen switchover.
    3) VRAM usage.

    I could name hundreds, but those were just the ones that popped into my head. The first two are dealbreakers for professional use, as I know myself, and the last is certainly a problem for gamers.

  6. The thing is, attestations of problems are positive evidence of problems while lack of problems isn’t evidence of lack of problems…

  7. Actually since Windows 8.1 addresses the 1st two and there are many was to address the 3rd I think you are crying wolf for no reason. However even before the release of 8.1 these were not really big issues BTW, how many of your ‘hundreds’ would also apply to the myriad of other OS options out there? Face the facts you probably have an anti-MSFT bone to pick and this article was an opportunity to vent. Do you feel better now?

  8. Unfortunately for you, I have extensively used both 8 and 8.1, so I’m quite aware of how far 8.1 ‘addressed’ those issues, in that it didn’t. At all. I’m fascinated by the idea that another OS could also suffer from the myriad of Metro transition issues when Metro is a MS feature alone; and I’m equally interested in other OSs that were explicitly and solely designed for keys/mouse having issues with keyboard and mouse… You didn’t really think that through, did you? You should read my other comment. You do not have the right to say that problems other people have with the OS are not problems, simply because you haven’t experienced them or don’t weight them the same. It doesn’t work that way. As I said below, “attestations of problems are positive evidence of problems while lack of problems isn’t evidence of lack of problems…” This is a philosophical adage at core, but it’s also fundamental to software development methodologies.

    I’m a big fan of 7, and I’ve been on the 10 consumer preview since the day of release – I think it’s a decent OS, with a good deal of annoyances but a lot of potential. Personally, I think Linux is generally the most adaptable, Apple’s various OSs are too restrictive to be comfortable to use, and I use Microsoft products 99% of the time because they’re easy and quite quick for me. I certainly have no issue with Microsoft. However, I’m acutely aware that Windows is meant to be suitable for business and professional users *primarily*. Home use is only a secondary concern (or should be considering their user base), and the focus on tablet and touch screen compatibility was intended to get a hold on the business tablet market, where Apple currently dominate. In that respect, Windows 8 and 8.1 were both miserable failures, and have simply failed to take hold. The truth is, people prefer to use Apple tablets (for reasons unknown to me), and Windows 8/8.1 for desktop is such a mess that system admins hate it as much as the business users do. Plenty of businesses were forced to upgrade to maintain security and support updates, but most avoided it as long as they could.

    Shall I predict your next comment?

    “Oh but you’re just afraid of change, and change is great. Right? RIGHT?”

    No, change is not inherently or automatically good. *Good* change is good, and a part of positive development is making mistakes, like Windows 8/8.1, but those mistakes need to be identified and rooted out, for progression to occur. Sycophantic Microsoft fanboyism like yours is hindering progress by telling Microsoft that Windows 8/8.1 is perfect when what we and they need is to identify the bad things.

    You should also probably look up the meaning of ‘crying wolf’. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.

  9. I hope my pirated Window 8.1 is upgradeable to Windows 10 for free…

  10. Windows 8.1 is 10 times better than Windows 8….

  11. Link to facebook is not working.

  12. Did you hacktivate using a WMC Key?

  13. Your prediction is wrong.

    I am going to argue a different point –

    >Windows is meant to be suitable for business and professional users
    *primarily*. Home use is only a secondary concern (or should be
    considering their user base),

    This is, unfortunately, wrong. The main reason MS Windows and Office are used in places of business, is because it is used at home – if the home market became dominated by Linux (It’s going to happen some day), most businesses would switch within a decade, and if MS didn’t adapt, they would be forced out of business.

  14. Every OS makes compromises and I’ve used almost all of them. Windows 8’s compromise was the legacy desktop because MSFT could not abandon the Apps their users depend on until everything got moved to Metro. Unfortunately that may never happen but if it had I would not be writing this. Windows 8.1 went a long way to fixing the difficulty of the context switching and Windows 10 will go even further. I might be many things but never have been or will be a MSFT sycophant and I’ve never said that 88.1 was perfect. In fact I was a beta user and did provide lots of positive and negative feedback. In fact some of my requests for changes look like they took until 8.1. to get added.
    I do agree that change is never automatically good but without change you will stagnate so even a bad change can lead to improvements if you can fix it fast enough.
    BTW, just in case you are unfamiliar with human anatomy your bellybutton is no more unique or important than the the next person’s and ‘cry wolf’ does mean exactly what I think it does and is quite apropos as I’ve apply it.

  15. Most people didn’t like Windows 8 because of Metro. There really are few other reasons which would matter to most users. I didn’t like it myself much, but the new laptop I bought recently came with 8.1. I installed Classic Shell and I don’t see much of a usability difference from Windows 7. My feeling is that it’s mostly just general hatred going about, with a lot less reason that for Vista (which was really bad at release). Even Vista I’ve used for a long time after 7 came around (and I had a 7 license) because Vista SP2 was very usable if you had enough RAM and I saw no reason to switch.

  16. I don’t know about that. I download the OS from kickasstorrent, installed it and it activate itself lol. As far as I know it has no virus. Been running it for 2 months already…

  17. You’ve lost me I’m afraid – which prediction?

    Your point does not contradict mine, and I’m not particularly inclined to disagree with you. Most businesses use Windows because it’s familiar to their users and easy to use, yes, but also because it has a good office feature set (compared with, for instance, OSX). If Windows is no longer familiar to their users and easy to use, and on top of that the feature set is diminished, businesses aren’t going to be (and weren’t) impressed. The only reason that MS care about home users is to keep Windows as the standard OS that people use, because that means businesses will keep buying it. Your point is complementary to mine, not in disagreement.

    I think MS played a dangerous game with Windows 8/8.1 at the time, because Linux has got considerably easier to use over the past few years (Ubuntu, etc), and they could very easily have gone past the tipping point for businesses and lost the dominant market share. It looks like they just about avoided that.

  18. There are many reasons. It’s not as simple as ‘not liking Metro’. The context switching isn’t just annoying, it’s a resource hog and primarily – and this is really damning – it wastes a *lot* of time. The constant transitioning between desktop and Metro costs seconds every time – on an old/low end business computer it costs even more. Add to this that nearly everything on Win8 takes more clicks, more effort, and more time, even though the OS as a whole is actually a lot more efficient at a low level at a lot of things. That efficiency is entirely lost because the UI is so poorly designed. Legacy support is almost non-existent, and because the whole OS is apparently designed with 5 year olds in mind they’ve removed almost all of the old manual troubleshooting options. That bluescreen page should have been the first warning, really. If something goes wrong then you have to put your hope in Windows to automatically fix it, and 99% of the time it doesn’t – but of course it won’t let you manually resolve the issue.

    About the only groups for whom 8/8.1 is manageable are causal users and gamers. And for the latter it was extremely problematic at launch because of compatibility issues (and remains problematic, though significantly less so), but the real killer is that extra VRAM usage. Most modern games now are pushing the limits of our VRAM (Shadow of Mordor, CoD, newly announced Metal Gear etc), and it’s just not ok to have all of that drain.

    Professionally, I wouldn’t touch 8/8.1 with a 10 foot barge pole, if I could avoid it. Unfortunately I can’t. I’d actually much prefer to use Vista for professional use than 8/8.1 – it may be the worst professional use OS I’ve encountered from MS. As a gamer, I could forgive everything (I’d use Classic Shell or something similar), apart from the VRAM use.

    If they resolve the VRAM use on 10 (I don’t know if they have) then I’ll switch over my gaming machine. Currently, I’m testing 10 for professional use too, and it seems like they’ve added a lot of features for professionals and evened out a lot of the issues with 8/8.1 that made it hell to use. I could cope with 10 professionally as it is, but I do hope they keep solving stuff (like merging Control Panel and PC Settings).

  19. I still don’t see any reason to switch from Windows 7 to windows 10…
    I have Windows 7 on my PC…
    Windows 8.1 on my tablet…
    Windows 7 works great for me… I don’t want or need the “cloud”… I don’t have to use a Microsoft account to use MY computer… It has Windows Media Center built in… It has aero graphics… (I’m not worried about so called resources as I have plenty of Ram, HD space and dual video cards…)..
    It boots from a cold start on an SSD as fast as my Windows 8.1 tablet from a cold start…
    It doesn’t have Metro tiles, apps or other toddler inspired crap…
    What does windows 10 do for me that I don’t already have…(That’s worth the cost and effort of upgrading)?

  20. LOL

  21. Windows 8 was actually decent once I hacked the shit out of it to make it like windows seven, I did see some backend performance increases however it did have some bugs after completely removing metro like random restarts etc, I did get my restart time down to 6 seconds which was amazing compared to 9 1/2 seconds on windows 7, don’t want the free upgrade on this computer though, I’ll build a computer and compare performance on there and see if all my programs work before I even think of upgrading.

  22. Try coding on windows 8, it involves a lot of multitasking and switching between programs, it just couldn’t work for me in its native state.