Microsoft took a gamble when it gave every Windows 7 and 8 license holder a free upgrade to Windows 10 and it looks to be paying off. Within less than six months of the release of the new operating system, Microsoft has secured a near 10 percent stake of the OS market with its new system, edging ever closer to that billion-install number Microsoft wants so badly.

These numbers come from a new NetMarketShare report which still has Windows 7 as the most popular operating system in the world, with a 56.11 percent share. However Windows 10 has cemented itself firmly in fourth place and is only a couple of points behind both Windows XP and Windows 8.1, both of which have approximately 11 percent of the global OS market.

What’s most impressive about this is that this shows a continued strong rate of adoption of Windows 10. While it saw its biggest upswing shortly after release, it’s still growing by around a percent of the market every month. If it continues at this rate, it won’t be more than a couple of years before W10 is the new dominant OS.

This would go well with Microsoft’s plan to have the OS installed on over a billion devices within three years. It needs that heavy adoption too, as it gives it a much bigger audience to market its subscription-based application too.

The landscape of OS adoption is even more in Microsoft’s favor if you look at only Steam gamer operating system choices. Windows 10 is currently the second-most popular OS on the platform, sitting just behind Windows 7, with a share just shy of 29 percent. That number has grown by 2.39 percent in the past month, cannibalizing both Windows 7 and 8.1 in doing so.

It seems gamers are ahead of the curve when it comes to Windows 10, but if they can accept the new operating system and have few problems with it — despite the myriad of gaming software they want to run successfully — it seems like it won’t be that much longer before the rest of the world catches up.

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