Officially, it’s been “out of service” since October 14. And indeed, Windows 10 market share has been falling for some time now, with 11 ascendant. But, in unwinding Windows 10’s long goodbye from the desktop OS scene, there’s no sign yet of a spiraling vortex as the old OS goes down the drain. Remember, too, that older OSes — inlcuding 7,  XP and 8.x versions all show up in a range from just under 3% (7) to under 0.3% (XP, 8, and 8.1). Apparently old OSes never fade away completely…

Unwinding Windows 10’s Long Goodbye via 7

As I think about what’s going on here, I can’t help but use Windows 7 as a lens through which to view Windows 10’s upcoming decline. This actually shows itself quite nicely in a Copilot-generated desktop share graph (source: Wikipedia’s summary of StatCounter data 2015-2025).

2015, of course, was the year in which Windows 10 made its debut. It was also the same year in which Windows 7 transitioned from “mainstream support” to “extended support.” That’s what Windows 10 did this year, in slightly different terms.

Notice the shape of the curve imposes modest steps until the midpoint. It shows more serious declines since then. My gut feel is that Windows 10 will experience a similar fall-off. That said, I also believe the curve will drop more precipitously. That’s because MS has long sworn to limit extended support for 10 to 3 years, whereas it didn’t end ESU for 7 until the 5-year mark (2020) came along.

That would put the half-way mark three rather than 5 years out, with faster dropoffs after that. That said, with RAM and GPU prices currently on a steep rise, the impetus to buy new hardware to meet Windows 11 requirements may have hit a steep wall. Here in Windows-World the path from A to B (or 2025 to the New Year and beyond) isn’t always straight or simple. Let’s see what happens, shall we?

Here’s an interesting milestone that raises an even more interesting question. In his Ignite 2025 keynote, Pavan Davuluri made this statement “At Ignite 2025, we’re celebrating a major milestone: Windows 11 now powers more than one billion people worldwide.” Windows 10 hit that same number in March 2020. As Windows 11 hits one billion active users, the tide is turning on Windows 10, too. Let’s talk about this changeover, shall we?

After Windows 11 Hits One Billion Active Users, Then What?

According to StatCounter, Windows 10 accounts for 41.75% of the user base, with Windows 11 at 55.18%. Assuming the 1 B count applies as of that date — perhaps foolish, but a point of departure anyway — that means ~757M users still run Windows 10. It also means that ~30.7 M still run some older Windows version.

This shows several interesting things, IMO:

• The Windows user base is pretty formidable, with perhaps as many as 1.8B users across all versions. it’s big but less than one-third compared to global 5.78B smartphone users.
• Windows 11 crossed over 10 last June, and is over 13% ahead of the older OS now. I expect this split to continue, with 11 gaining ever more market share.
• It took Windows 10 13 months to increase from 1B to 1.3B (April 2021); I think Windows 11 will cross that span more quickly.
• It took Windows 10 five years to hit the 1B mark; Windows 11 did it in 4 years. With Windows 10 EOS behind us, it can only gain momentum.
• With MS offering free ESU to consumer grade users for one year, that momentum may be somewhat blunted. This is offset by the remaining 30-35% of “strictly business” Windows 10 users who MUST pay for ESU. Estimates of ESU Windows 10 users vary widely, anywhere from 100-400M.

It’s an interesting situation, and an even more interesting landscape. As always, it will be fun to wait and watch for another such milestone announcement from MS. I wonder if that means Ignite 2026, or something sooner? Here in Windows-World, waiting and wondering are both hugely germane and useful attributes for those who labor in such fields.

Just yesterday, I was catching up over at ElevenForum.com, and read a thread entitled “Winget errors…” It talked about issues accessing the WinGet source error. It reads "Failed in attempting to update the source: winget." I’ve seen this before myself. It occurs mostly when issues involved with accessing the MS WinGet servers come up. Then it happened to me soon thereafter, for updates and for an attempted export/import operation. This kind of WinGet chaos presages changes, as it shows a shakier Internet infrastructure than normal. Let me explain…

WinGet Chaos Presages Changes in Server Access/Reliability

In working with any cloud based service — including WinGet — the presumption is that the service is “always available.” Bad things, or nothing, happens when it’s unavailable. Ditto for issues when attempting to access the Internet infrastructure and cloud that leads to said service. Things don’t work like they’re supposed to — that’s where the “Chaos” part comes in — until the service returns to normal, expected behavior.

Recently, I’ve seen reports of outages or DNS attacks that have taken AWS, Google, Microsoft and others offline. Sometimes it’s just minutes, sometimes it’s hours; rarely, it’s half a day or longer. But chaos follows in the wake of such outages when things stop working, or don’t work as they should. Perhaps the strangest recent manifestion occurred when Internet-connected beds (human sleeping platforms) got wonky during an AWS outage.

Closer to my desk, yesterday’s WinGet weirdnesses reflect the same chaos that ensues when expected information sources and handling in the cloud go away. It seems to be happening more often. I’m inclined to look for ways to fall back on local information rather than simply failing when cloud information isn’t available.

In small things, and small ways, little bits of Chaos remain unavoiodable. Chaos is seldom desirable, especially in big doses. Let’s hope the wizards who make Windows-World such a big thing feel the same way, and help us work toward failover or workarounds to keep the Chaos at bay.

Note Added 4+ Hours Later: Azure Outage

As I’m reading Windows related news this afternoon, I see ample coverage of a major Azure outage yesterday afternoon. For example, Neowin  Microsoft Azure hit by massive outage… Whaddya bet the WinGet stuff falls under that umbrella. Seems to be working fine today, though.

It’s interesting and perhaps a bit puzzling. For “compatibility reasons” — some having to do with browsing the Web — Windows 11 has long reported itself as a kind of Windows 10. Indeed, one must examine Build numbers, mostly, to figure out which version of Windows is really driving the bus. To see this enduring Windows 10 hangover try this string in PowerShell:

[System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version

You can, of course, get the real skinny by running winver.exe, or a more nuanced Get-ItemProperty command in PowerShell:

Get-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion" | Select-Object DisplayVersion, EditionID, CurrentBuild

You can see the results of these two commands in this blog post’s lead-in graphic. It still shows my production Windows 11 PC (Build 26200) with a Major version number of “10,” while the Get-ItemProperly output shows the “real deal” on this machine.

Will Enduring Windows 10 Hangover Get Fixed?

Now that Windows 10 is past its End of Service date, will MS fix this strange reporting practice? Probably not. There are reasons upon reasons why this reporting quirk is likely to remain unaltered.

The whole compatibility thing is HUGE: lots of driver models, apps and applications, and enterprise tools assume that Windows 10 is the end-all and be-all for modern Windows versions. Indeed, it’s much, much more than a browser user-agent assumption. According to Copilot, “enterprise environments rely on registry keys such as ProductName and ReleaseId for automation,” so “those keys are often left untouched in Insider Builds to avoid disrupting telemetry and deployment pipelines.”

Hence the following, also from PowerShell using this command sequence:

Get-ComputerInfo | Select-Object WindowsProductName, WindowsVersion, OsBuildNumber

Notice that my Production Win11 system reports in this command as Windows 10 Pro, version 2009, with correct build number.

At least, I now know why this apparent misreporting occurs, and understand that it’s for good cause. Here in Windows-World there are plenty of apparent mysteries whose simple explanations lie in the many twists and turns in Windows history. This is one of those, I reckon.