Windows 10 is now most popular PC OS as Windows 7 wanes

Three years after Windows 10's release, Microsoft's latest desktop OS has finally overtaken Windows 7, which Microsoft released in 2009 and will stop supporting next year. Net Market Share's December 2018 report shows that 39.22 percent of the machines from which it collects statistics use Windows 10, just ahead of the 36.9 percent that use Windows 7. The cross-over happened over the month of December, though each version's share of Windows devices has been close throughout the entire year. Fellow web analytics firm StatCounter reported Windows 10 overtaking Windows 7 last January. The two firms use different methodologies to count desktop marketshare as explained in this piece by ZDNet's Ed Bott. Another reliable source to compare desktop usage is the US government's analytics portal, which shows systems used to visit government websites.