Report: Windows instability is causing a lot of issues in enterprise environments

Windows sees far more crashes, hangs, and shutdowns than macOS in enterprises, causing major productivity losses and growing stability concerns.

Bugs being discovered in Windows environments isn't surprising for many at this point. In the past week or so alone, Microsoft has fixed Bluetooth issues, along with sign-in and internet access problems with many enterprise apps. Although Microsoft has vowed to address user complaints and improve the performance of Windows in 2026, it remains to be seen how it will actually achieve these goals. Now, a new report has revealed some statistics about how unstable the OS can be in enterprise environments.

According to a new report from Omnissa, also shared with Neowin via email, even small disruptions in workflows lead up to 24 minutes of lost productivity as employees need time to refocus on their work again. While compiling its report, Omnissa analyed Windows and macOS endpoints, and discovered the following:

• Windows devices exhibited 3.1 times more total forced shutdowns than macOS.
• Windows experienced 2.2 times more total application crashes than macOS.
• Windows experienced 7.5 times more app hangs than macOS.
• More than 50% of the Windows and Android devices in regulated industries such as healthcare and pharma were five major OS updates behind
• More than 50% of education desktops and mobile devices are unencrypted

All of these are particularly troubling statistics, especially with regards to Windows deployments.

Omnissa believes that there are four trends that emphasize the need for real-time observability. These include the rise of shadow AI, the hidden cost of poor digital employee experience (DEX), poor security hygeine, and the total cost of ownership while maintaining hardware assets.

The firm also shared several other interesting statistics, such as the fact that Copilot was installed on 97.5% of enterprise-managed mobile devices, but that employee-installed alternatives like ChatGPT (91% of iOS devices) and Gemini (61% of Android devices) are popular too. In addition, organizations which purchase Macs generally consider them to be an asset investment with a life of six years while Windows devies have a lifespan of three years. In a similar vein, the "DEX good score" for macOS is 120% higher than that of Windows. However, despite most of these statistics not really doing Windows a favor, the OS is heavily used in government environments, where growth was 2x year over year (YoY).

It is worth noting that Omnissa's report is based on anonymized telemetry data aggregated from millions of endpoint devices throughout 2025. The firm's tools are leveraged by 26,000 enterprise customers worldwide across 17 industries. It used to be a subdivision of VMware before being spun off as an independent company in 2024. As such, while it may not present a truly "100% accurate" representation of the current enterprise landscape, its findings are still based off of a sizeable sample size.

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Posted Thursday 26 March 2026 at 12:33 pm AEST (my time).

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