Employees still prefer Windows 7, but companies are giving them Windows 10 anyway!

Microsoft officially launched Windows 10 a year ago and foisted it vigorously on consumers. But corporate America, always a little slower to adopt the latest and greatest, hasn't been entirely left.

Some 38% of companies have adopted Windows 10 for at least some of their employees, in line with expectations of a 40% adoption rate in the first year, according to a survey of 866 IT professionals who work in companies with more than 250 employees, conducted by Spiceworks, a social-networking site for IT pros.

That's actually a really fast adoption rate. Historically, most big companies tended to avoid new versions of Windows, waiting until Microsoft released its first big update, when most of the kinks were worked out, typically a year after the original product was released.

The IT pros who are supporting Windows 10 in their companies generally like it. They say that Windows 10 is faster, has some good security options, and works better with Office 365, which companies are racing to adopt, too.

But the employees? That's another story. Sixty-nine percent of the IT pros surveyed said that their employees still prefer Windows 7.

In the Spiceworks press release, Joe Kinne, IT manager at Prime Electric, put it like this:

"We're rolling out Windows 10 on our new devices and upgrading a majority of our existing devices, and the biggest benefit so far has been the overall speed and performance of the OS. At first, our end users were reluctant to give up a system they already know and like, but they quickly caught on and adapted really well once they began to try the new features and realize the improvements."

On the other hand, because so many employees and companies remain satisfied with Windows 7, the IT pros at the remaining over 60% of companies in the survey say that they are in no rush to upgrade.

They will trickle over to Windows 10 over the next few years when they have a pressing reason to do so.

This helps to explain another reason why Microsoft is no longer on track to have Windows 10 installed on 1 billion devices within the next two years.