Market Share of Vista 11 Said to be Going Down in Europe
The relative share of Vista 11 is down by about 1.5% this month (compared to other versions of Windows)
Vista 11 is probably the most disastrous version of Windows, perhaps except for "ME" (which was short-lived). It was impulsively vomited out by Microsoft at a time it was desperate to distract from several simultaneously-spreading (and "viral") scandals. It was just a fake "leak" of an in-house build or Vista 10 with some GUI changes, i.e. it would represent fragmentation with no practical benefits and possibly worse patches (hence riskier to adopt or "upgrade" to). The only reason Vista 11 got any share (or any "traction" at all) is that people buy new PCs - as the old ones 'break' sometimes (Windows breaks) - and the OEMs have secret deals with Microsoft; they're likely to get penalised for not pre-loading all these PCs with Vista 11. No monopoly? Then no 'discounts'...
The numbers from Europe are interesting as they either represent a "Correction" (bad data, exaggerating in Microsoft's favour) or "Escape" from Microsoft. Looking at countries like the Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria (one particular cluster), GNU/Linux grows, but the above erosion of Vista 11 "share" isn't related to that. That's just its share relative to other versions of Windows.
So one plausible explanation is that gs.statcounter.com is actually misreporting the share of Vista 11, claiming that it's higher than it really is. Microsoft loves citing these numbers as 'evidence' that Vista 11 is doing well, even if a year after its release only about 2% of Windows users 'upgraded' to it. █