In other posts here, I’ve groused about AdDuplex and its (IMO) over-reporting of Windows 11 marketshare. My February 1 item is a good example. Just yesterday, I noticed that a major desktop OS marketshare tracker — namely Statcounter –registers Windows 11 amidst the versions it follows. The lead-in graphic above, in fact, refreshed just this morning (April 1) grants Windows 11 an 8.47% share of Windows desktops overall. Good-oh! Now that Windows 11 makes marketshare radar I can trust, those numbers will get increasingly real.
What Windows 11 Makes Marketshare Radar Means
This means major tracking sites (NetMarketShare, Statcounter, Statista, and analytics.usa.gov) are instrumenting their sites to track Windows 11. This is a bit trickier than it seems, because Windows 11 presents itself as Windows 10 in its basic user agent info. One must use agent-hints to pick Windows 11 out from that crowd. Indeed, some programming effort is required to make this happen.
To me, that goes a long way toward explaining why Windows 11 has been off that radar since it made its initial debut on June 28, 2021. (Its public debut occurred on October 4, 2021.) Now it’s finally on at least one real radar (I don’t count AdDuplex, as I explain in the afore-cited post) so we finally have some statistically defensible means to figure out how many Windows 11 instances might be in use.
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
If indeed there are 1.5B instances of Windows in use (as MS has recently claimed) and 8.47% of them are Windows 11, that’s a simple calculation. The result is 127M, give or take 50,000. I had guessed in February that the number could be between 50 and 100 million. Looks like I wasn’t too far off the mark. Using the latest AdDuplex value of 19.4 percent, that number would be 291M. I just don’t believe it’s that big: now how, no way.
As more tracking sites start reporting Windows 11 desktop share numbers — and I have to believe they will, and soon — we’ll be able to refine our understanding of Windows 11 numbers further. Stay tuned, and I’ll keep you posted.
