Depending on how you look at the stats, adoption of Windows 10 is either slowing down or well on the way towards Microsoft’s proclaimed goal of having its OS on one billion devices within two years of its release.

New data from analytics vendor Net Applications shows Windows 10 is now running on nine percent of all PCs, following its release just four months ago.

While that’s an achievement, it’s also a significant slowdown in adoption for the OS, which claimed five percent market share in its first month but has only gained around one percent each month since. Still, with Windows 10 now running on roughly 148 million PCs, Microsoft is 15 percent of the way towards its one billion device goal.

The most pressing challenge for Microsoft now will be to reverse this slowdown in adoption, and it’s already made moves in that direction – first, by making Windows 10 a “recommended update” which means Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users are more likely to ‘accidentally’ install the OS, and also through a new partnership with China’s Baidu aimed at boosting adoption in that country.

Interestingly, Net Applications’ data shows that Windows 10’s two immediate predecessors, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, both managed to gain market share in the last month. Windows 8 rose by 0.34 percentage points to 2.88 percent, while Windows 8.1 notched another 0.47 percent to reach 11.15 percent of the market. Windows 7’s market share also increased, rising by 0.40 percentage points to 56.11 percent overall.

The biggest loser this month was actually Apple, whose Mac OS X operating system saw its share plunge by 1.01 percent to 6.99 percent overall. As for the bevvy of Linux distros out there, they gained 0.05 points to reach 1.62 percent of the market.

Net Applications takes its data from a network of some 40,000 websites it monitors for its client. It captures data from 160 million unique visitors each month, measuring user market share. For those who would prefer to see usage market share data, a better source would be StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views each month.

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