Microsoft Announces LinkedIn Integration With Cortana Digital Assistant

Windows 10 users can enjoy the fruits of this partnership by connecting their LinkedIn account to Cortana. But the major lure has been to make Windows 10 a free upgrade for the first year to anyone running Windows 7 or 8.1.

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 10’s usage share jumped to 5.21% of the cross-platform operating system market in that first month surpassing Mac OS X, Linux and Windows Vista.

For Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Windows 10’s surpassing of Windows 8 is good news, but the sad news is that Windows 7 still remains the most popular desktop operating system with a market share above 50%. Remember you can sync all of these settings between all of your Windows 10 devices via the Accounts page in the Settings app. Figures are expected to increase, however, in the coming months as Windows 10 becomes available to more users.

September’s stats are not nearly as impressive as they show a growth of 1.42 percentage points only. Windows 10 is still below Windows 8.1, which despite a tiny decline of 0.62 per cent, still holds 10.72 per cent share.

Whatever, Windows XP isn’t making a comeback, but will Windows 8.1? That could be due to the season, as September is the month in which kids go back to school and people return to work from vacations, so they may have more on their plates than jumping to a new version of Windows. It didn’t surpass 6 percent until the following August when it scored a 7.4 percent share.

Another driver for Windows 10 growth in the near future is Windows devices pre-loaded with new processors from Intel and AMD.

Net Applications’ numbers also validate the slowdown in a different way.