Let’s face it: consumers just don’t like Windows 11

It feels as if we’re all beating a dead horse at this point – but it’s such a unique, fascinating and depressing situation all at once that it deserves revisiting every now and then just out of sheer curiosity: StatCounter’s May Windows version market share chart confirms that Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 11, is still nowhere near to where it should probably have been by now in terms of consumer popularity. It gained just 1.3% last month, which – unbelievably enough – is a win given that it had managed to actually lose market share to Windows 10 in April and March. It was a rare sight, watching a 9-year-old computer operating system regain market share from its successor, yet it did happen.

At the time of publication StatCounter reported that Windows 10 was used on no less than 68% of the world’s PCs based on any Windows version, as opposed to 27.7% that are based on Windows 11. To put that into perspective: every new PC sold after, say, January 2022 – and most of those sold from October 2021 to January 2022 – is based on Windows 11, while Microsoft has officially stopped selling Windows 10 licenses since January 2023. For Windows 10 to still be used by almost 70% of all Windows users, Windows 11 would have to fail attracting even 1% of active Windows PCs during each one of the last 32 months. Which is what evidently happened.

This basically means that not only are people using Windows 10-based PCs not upgrading to Windows 11 (assuming they have the option to do so) even if it doesn’t cost a dime, but people building new PCs actually prefer looking for an old Windows 10 activation key to use than getting a Windows 11 key much more easily. If that hadn’t been the case, then the decommissioning of old PCs along with the sales of new PCs would have slowly helped Windows 11 finally close in on that elusive market share of 30% after almost three years, but… no. Still less than 28% it is.

Yes, there have been other times in the history of Windows that a new version did not exactly rock the world of most consumers – Windows Vista or Windows 8 come to mind – but people seem to be actively avoiding Windows 11, only using them when they have no other choice (i.e. when the new PC they just got came with Windows 11 preinstalled). To not be all that excited about the added functionality a new version of Windows brings to the table is one thing, but not wanting to have anything to do with it even if it’s offered for free is quite another. No wonder that many analysts – included yours truly – called Windows 11 a failure fairly early on.

In retrospect, it’s clear that Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements have played a part in all of this – but they simply cannot account for this almost universal consumer aversion towards the company’s latest operating system. Whether it was because it was delivered in an unfinished state, because it has raised numerous privacy concerns or because it contains more ads than ever, Windows 11 is just an undesirable piece of software. Microsoft has done nothing to win the hearts of consumers and plenty to lose their trust and anger them. It is as simple as that.

Posts, articles and videos of members of the tech community explaining why they are leaving Windows for macOS or Linux or even ChromeOS are popping up much more often these days – which can’t be coincidental either. People are just fed up. This might not be “the end of Windows”, not by a long shot, but it definitely feels like a line has been crossed and a point of no return has been reached. Whether Microsoft’s ambitious “AI PC” plan can actually turn things around for its line of operating systems remains to be seen but, in all honesty, its chances do not look good right now. Can Windows 12 right so many wrongs? Only time will tell.