Launched on July 29, it has been less than three weeks for Windows 10 poweringconsumers' machines. In this time, Microsoft's latest desktop operating system has been downloaded and installed on over 53 million devices, worldwide.

Windows 10 market share goingstrong

Microsoft has an ambitious goal of having Windows 10 powering a billion units in the next two to three years. While the current counterat around 53 million seems nowhere near to that goal, it is quite a feat to achieve for Microsoft having a slower adoption rate historically, in the span of only a couple of weeks. Thanks to its roll-out strategy and free upgrades offered to the users of Windows 7, 8 and Windows 8.1, earlier adoption has been quite admirable. However, we will see more incrementin this number once OEMs are out with Windows 10 powered machines and more importantly, when Windows 10 gets away from the initial lot of bugs that are keeping many users away from this update.

According toStatCounter, Windows 10's running on 53 million computers accounts for 4.95% of the market share (as of last week). In comparison, Apple OS X 10.10 had a market share of 4.74% while Windows 8.1 had a share of 13.09% at the end of July, reports NetMarketSharewho has different ways of collating data thanStatCounter. While it is not really certainfor now if Windows 10 has actually surpassed the market share of OS X Yosemite, it seems very likely for it do so in the coming week(s).

Microsoft is yet to announce the milestone of Windows 10's 50 million downloads. We have only seen one announcement of 14 million upgrades from Redmond earlier in the month. It would be wrong to compare Windows 10 market share either with OS X or the earlier Windows offerings as this is the only time we are seeing a major operating system coming as a free install for millions of users. OS X still only caters to a very small number of desktop / laptop users and earlier Windows versions also remained premium products rather than the current freemium approach of Windows 10.

In any case, it was a thrilling episode to see Windows 10 being downloadedon so many machines simultaneously as it was being installed on over 1500 machines per second, at its peak. Let's see when Microsoft announces the next milestones achieved by Windows 10.