As we've previously noted, Microsoft has been incredibly persistent in pushing Windows 10, most recently marking their latest and greatest OS as a recommended update.
That push, with the goal of being on a billion devices in three years, is apparently paying off, even with companies wary of the challenges the upgrade will bring.
Spiceworks recently wrapped up its second report on Windows 10 adoption by IT departments, and found that 18% of business environments surveyed had adopted Windows 10 within the first six months of its release.
That's a huge improvement over Windows 8, which only saw a 9.3% penetration rate six months after its launch.
And Peter Tsai, a Spicework analyst who worked on the report, said that he was confident that number would continue to grow, particularly as the deadline for free upgrades for non-Enterprise installs approaches in July (their survey found 64% of IT managers took the free upgrade offer into consideration for their upgrade plans).
"One of the things we've been surprised by is how often people followed through and upgraded to Windows 10," he said, referencing their previous study on the issue. He said that he suspects that Microsoft's rapid iterations on key concerns — such as telemetry data and update control — helped assuage many of the early concerns.
"There were some early adoption headaches," Tsai said. "Microsoft was looking at all that data and error reports, and was moving very fast to put new features into the builds. People are seeing that Microsoft is trying a lot harder to address the complaints than they've seen before."
But there's a big caveat to that adoption rate: Spiceworks gauged adoption rate based on companies that have at least Windows 10 device on their network, meaning that even the smallest of trials counts in that 18%.
In fact, the Spiceworks study found that only about 7% of companies have more than one or two Windows 10 devices on their network, but Tsai sees that number as a relatively positive sign for the new OS.
"Before it might have just been testing, but we're seeing people move beyond that a little bit," he said. "It's interesting to see how much further ahead of the curve they are."
Spiceworks has more details in the full report.
