Now that’s what you call putting up a fight: good old Windows 10 is still very popular.
In France, despite Microsoft’s countless incentives, the Windows 10 operating system still accounts for 26.92% of the market share on “active” Windows PCs, while Windows 11, as expected, takes the lead with 69.65% of the market share, according to statistics published by StatCounter. This distribution naturally favors the most recent system, but it also perfectly illustrates the impressive resilience of Windows 10. Microsoft has therefore still not achieved its goal of permanently replacing Windows 10 with Windows 11. Worse yet, the American software giant is being forced to back down.
Windows 10 Extended Security Updates© Windows Latest
On October 14, Microsoft had, however, carried out its “threat”: ending support for Windows 10. This meant that no new features or major patches would be released for the aging operating system. However—in a first “admission of defeat”—Microsoft was forced to launch a special program,the Extended Security Update (or ESU), to ensure that individual users still on Windows 10 would have some continuity in terms of security: security patches for the system would therefore continue to be released, at least for one year. The ESU was indeed scheduled to end permanently one year later, on October 13.
“Was supposed to,” because Microsoft has finally changed its mind, and on the official Windows 10 support site, the date now mentioned is October 12… 2027—meaning an additional year of support. Microsoft hasn’t publicized this surprising extension, but the Windows Latest website has received confirmation from the company that this is not a mistake. Microsoft states that this extension is no coincidence: the goal is to give Windows 10 users (yet) a little more time to migrate to the more modern Windows 11. More modern, certainly, but still shunned, even though the hardware requirements for the latest version are significantly higher than those of Windows 10. The problem for Microsoft is that, with current price inflation on many components, our gut tells us that this extra year won’t be enough.
