Microsoft Claims 110M Devices Now Run Windows 10 (computerworld.com)
New submitter enterpriseITrocks writes: Computerworld reports that Windows 10 is running on 110 million devices, citing stats provided by Panos Panay, the chief of the Surface team. It's the first time since late August that Microsoft has provided usage stats for Win10 at a time when the new OS was running on 75 million machines. From the article: "Microsoft's 110 million described those running Windows 10, not downloads, the company confirmed. A spokeswoman declined to describe how the company tracks uptake, but presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs."
Windows 10 isn't supposed to be installed on any devices!
With how aggressively they pushed it is there any reason to be skeptical?
Accidental install
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
with all the baked in spyware, they know _everything_ about windows10 usage, including every user's secrets and confidential data.
Thank you for the generous offer of a *FREE* downgrade from my current Windows Ultimate version to Windows 10 Pro but I'm not interested. I've already overpaid for what I've got and FU if you think you can downgrade me to the adware riddled privacy invading crap you are currently peddling.
Windows 11
I was going to upgrade to Windows Nine, but they cancelled that one
I wonder how many of those are new Surface computers ready to be shipped.
Then I realized it's Windows 10 we're talking about here...
and only 13 know it.
Table-ized A.I.
Apple is in REAL trouble now. OS X is stagnant, the iPad has flatlined and the Surface is quickly eating its marketshare. Apple's lone strength is the iPhone but even that is now under threat with Microsoft's amazing new phones they just announced and the upcoming iOS and Android compatibility layer. Windows on every platform is poised to reclaim what little ground it has lost and do in both Apple and Linux/Android once and for all.
School has started. just as many Win7's could of been sold if that were the os installed.
Just install Windows 8.0 and then Windows 3.0.
Table-ized A.I.
I haven't applied any patches since I learned they're adding their spyware to Win 8.1 updates. Makes me nervous, but I'd rather trust my habits and firewall than Microsoft.
Actually there are many more computers out there. The vast bulk run Android and iOS.
Windows trolls hate it, pretend they're not computers, but they are.
I think if Android becomes multi-window (our tablets are Note 12.2s, but there isn't a good multi-window desktop sized device for Android yet) and keep the high res, 8 core+, all the same features we have on the tablets, the remaining PCs will be switched over too.
Leaving 1 PC (mine running Eclipse) as the sole PC.
Think about it for a second, do you really think we'd have mostly Android devices, and yet upgrade desktop devices to a piss poor touch interface simply because it can run legacy software? Why?
I wonder how many of these "activations" or windows 10 installs are people doing what I've done to over a dozen machines - "upgrade" from Windows 7 just to lock-in the permanent Windows 10 activation for that PC in the Microsoft servers during the free year.
I guarantee Microsoft hasn't captured the "telemetry" of uninstalling (where they have you put in the reason you are going back) for any of these, because then I blow away the Windows 10 with the original disk image, make sure that all of the GWX ads, unapproved "update agent" auto downloading and multiple spyware telemetry updates are removed from Win7, and disable the windows update service. Then I blackhole any machine that tries to connect to the "vortex" telemetry servers through the firewall.
upgraded! Maybe they're counting upgrade attempts. As is well documented, there are more than a dozen serious errors that prevent the upgrade from working. Also, Microsoft requires you to successfully install every current update in order to be allowed to upgrade. That's just too many moving pieces to work reliably. I haven't been able to get the upgrade to work on any of my five Windows systems at home because of previous updates failing.
"presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs"
That would be my guess as well but doesn't tell you if any of them kept Windows 10.
110 M uses having installed windows 10 is not the same as converting 110M users but MS would spin it that way to helpconvince others people liked 10 and convince developers to target it.
Someday Microsoft will change tactics and try to just play well within markets instead of trying to use manipulation to get ownership of them... I may not live that long but it would be nice to see.
In other news, Microsoft is expecting to sell 110M devices running Windows 10 in the next quarter. :-)
How many of those are on devices owned by MS? 109.9M?
What is Microsoft up to?
Scare quotes around spy? Your contempt towards people who think they should own their computer, not Microsoft, in duly noted.
You claim that since it's possible to disable Microsoft's spyware ("telemetry"), people should use Windows 10 instead of 8.1 (or, presumably, any other earlier version of Windows. For the moment, i will assume that you indeed have the ability to find 0all of the ways Microsoft is harvesting data (including supposedly "anonymized" statistics), and have some sort of method (or free time) to police all the forced updates in the future that may try to re-enable those features. I will also assume that Windows 10 is, as you say, "100% better", even though this is a situational claim that depends a lot on subjective opinion.
So Microsoft releases a version of windows that is actively hostile to it's users. You could choose the capitalist response and resisted upgrading punish them in the market until released a product people wanted ot buy. You could have chosen to avoid the problem by using a different vendor (or no vendor. You could have simply decided that your data is more important than shiny baubles and stayed with an earlier version of windows. You could have even taken a different approach an appealed to Microsoft (as a politician, as a journalist or even simply as a customer) to release a version of Windows 10 (perhaps at a higher price) that didn't have the features you don't want and will have to spend time removing. All of these options signal correctly to Microsoft that maybe they shouldn't be so brazen and presumptuous with user data in the future.
Instead, you choose to pay Microsoft (either directly with cash or indirectly with your data and privacy. By choosing to reward Microsoft for their decision to make Windows into spyware., you are conditioning them to continue adding spyware to their products. By choosing to shield Microsoft form the costs of cleaning up their own mess by paying your own time to "disable all the telemetry", you bias the feedback they receive even further towards "more spyware".
Of course, I'm being a bit presumptuous. You didn't actually claim to have disabled telemetry yourself, so the better interpretation of your comment is that you are an apparatchik - a true believer that truly believes the "features" provided in Windows 10 are worth more than the your future privacy.
Eventually, Microsoft will release yet another version of windows (they've always love their service packs) that you finally offends even the sensibilities of the apparatchick. Maybe you finally woke up to the full breadth of what they are collection. Maybe you finally got tired trying to find all the new laces they hide their "telemetry" spyware every time new patches show up on Windows Update. You will be very annoyed, but remember, you asked for that future by staying with Windows. You asked to be spied on when you continued to pay them. Well, I hope you enjoy the consequences. of those choices.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Do they remove the one's who updates to Windows 10 only to go back to Windows 7/8 afterwards ???
... Is full of it. Next please.
No, no, no.... That's not complete...
Install Windows 8.0 and then Windows 3.0 and THEN all the spyware and adware you can find...
Now it's finally done...
Booted my dual-boot computer into Windows to try the free upgrade out of curiosity. I usually use Windows once a year, to update my satnav maps (and cure them for not having a linux update option)
These = phones + computers.
Really ? Five systems failed ? Wow.... I'm speechless. I have 2 of 2. Without any effort. I must be extremely lucky.
... and like the 3 BILLION or so devices that run Java...
... they all do it poorly.
Given that your 0 for 5 upgrade record is far below the normal user's experience, I would say you're doing something wrong. Or you've just got a lot of really messed up hardware.
My take away was that Microsoft tried throwing out some big numbers hoping nobody actually did the math. I think its clear Windows 10 adoption has slowed even though Windows 10 is free, many with Windows 7 or 8 with auto Windows updates on got Windows 10 install files downloaded to their device and most likely prompted to install Windows 10 many times. But like with any huge group of devices some will upgrade fine while others have huge issues. Even a company like Apple which designs, engineers and develops its own devices cannot get away from dealing with failed upgrades to operating systems. I myself had issues both with Windows 10 and Apple's OS X El Capitan. Neither would work with some peripherals I have and the third party companies won't be fixing them to work with either OS indefinitely. I think both operating systems are perfectly fine and work well and are stable in themselves. But if shit don't work it don't work.
Indeed. They have it installed on 100 million Windows phones before putting them in a landfill.
if it had been 110 billion i'd still not be impressed. in the vast majority of cases, it was not chosen. so my question is, in how many cases was window 10 chosen over somthing else?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...a really big botnet
What microsoft wanted to say is that 110 devices now run Windows 10 version M.
Why wouldn't they? When information starts pouring into their servers about every keystroke you made, your bank account password, how many times a day you wank and what your second cousin had for breakfast, what else could it be but Win10 ratting you out.
Or maybe a NSA back door.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It probably won't be accurate. A lot of people I know, myself included, installed Windows 10 and then removed it within a day or two.
That is not true at all. If you want to use the option to automatically upgrade to Windows 10 then you do need quite a few updates installed but if you download and use the you can upgrade an existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 install regardless of what updates have or have not been installed.
Indeed, Microsoft recommends that you use the Media Creation Tool on systems that are having problems installing updates or for systems that don't have reliable Internet connectivity. As long as you choose the "Upgrade" option in the installer and the existing Windows 7 or 8 install is activated you won't have to enter a product key.
Not as well as 7 on most of my devices. I will admit it does work fine on single use machines like my HTPC but, even my Surface continues to annoy me with bugs and inconsistencies. They should make unifying (or perhaps completely duplicating functionality) the schizophrenic control panel situation a priority... I absolutely hate the "touch friendly" controls. Toggle switches are an abomination.
Ya - What he said!!!!
is the rest of the sentance!
Listen, I do have two WIN10 Boxes I will only use when someone calls for help....one is the free update and the other is the MSDN forever Alpha...
Point is the Planet isn't going to 10 yet, and when it starts to we'll get more of this nonsense that what is more popular is obviously better.
I just can't believe that MS stock isn't in the toilet after all the things we've concluded from their new OS.
It's just as if they stopped caring if we found their spyware. Sad really.The only selling point is that it's a little better than 8.1 but compared to 7 Fails.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Three were Windows 7 and 8.1 systems. Win 10 went through all the installation motions, with the multiple reboots and auto-downloading a long series of Windows Updates. After all that, the final boot...came back into the old version of Windows without any indication of what Windows 10 objected to in the user's configuration.
The fourth was a new-in-box Dell Inspiron that came with 10 installed. The setup screens went by routinely until I got to the "Set up a Microsoft Account" step. It required the user's email as the ID, and this user had only one, which he has used for years, but the installer rejected that address on grounds of "Invalid domain" whatever that means. Support told me "That happens all the time" and advised getting a new Gmail address to use, but the user didn't want to complicate his life by doing that. So I backed up to the preceding install screen so I could opt for "Set up without a Microsoft Account." Doing this caused the Windows installer to crash hard, requiring that I restore the entire thing from the recovery partition and start over.
The fifth Windows 10 install was into a fresh VMWare Fusion image on my own iMac under OS X 10.11. It worked first time. Now I'm advising everyone who really wants Windows 10 to either wait a year as usual until it becomes usable, or get a Mac, install VMWare, and set up a Windows image.
Wow. Incompetence is the only explanation there. How can you mess up 4 installs? Also, support suggested you get a Gmail address? Sounds unlikely.
if you believe Oracle...though why would you?
My one Windows 10 upgrade was flawless from the DVD. I'm scared of the download method, though, mostly because I've wasted hours trying to convince Windows 10 to *not* install on my Windows 7 PCs. Worse, Windows Update offered the Get Windows 10 App *again* this week, this time as an Important update, in case I didn't take enough punishment the first time around.
If you didn't install from ISO, this seems to be a good starting point.
Lemme see. Sigh.
2nd link says OS X 10.10 has 4.91% of overall market share, which they figured from browsing stats, which seems to me to be a sane proxy for the vast majority of computers running Windows and OS X both.
This link says there were over a billion computers out there (in 2008, no doubt more now, but I used the 1,000,000,000 figure anyway.)
So. 1,000,000,000 * 0.0491 = 49,100,000 computers running OS X 10.10.
Maybe I'm just being (repeatedly) dense but I don't see the problem with the math. You (or anyone who cares to correct me) can be snarky if you like and I won't complain, but would you please point out where I went wrong?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The productization of the customer will continue until morale improves. Nadella is doing everything I feared he would.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
LOL predictable I think is the word best used here.
The failed upgrades were all auto-installs performed using Microsoft's published procedure, starting from that little System Tray icon in 7/8.1 that invites the user to try the new version out. What's happening is that the current, early-release version of 10 detects something in the hardware configuration it doesn't like, and fails without letting anyone know what the problem was, so that the user will just blame himself, rather than Microsoft. As time goes on, I'm sure the Windows 10 install will be updated to include more of the similar-like-snowflakes possible configurations of PC.
And yes, the "Invalid domain" bug in the setup for Microsoft Account rejects so many perfectly good email addresses that Support actually recommends signing up for a new Gmail address a a workaround.
given the reports that it is auto-downloading without permission?
That Dell should run Linux just fine. 20 minutes or so to install. The hard part is thinking up a user name and password. You'll have to reboot once, too.
Yes, after spending the time restoring the installer from the recovery partition, setup from the "No Microsoft Account" pathway was routine. You just have to know beforehand that your email address will be one of the magic addresses that you cannot use to set up a Microsoft Account, and that you therefore have to use the strongly-discouraged "No Microsoft Account" option.
You missed the part where I said I installed Linux.
If only I could convince more of my IT customers to go the Linux route on their PCs. Instead, any horrible experience with Windows tends to result in getting a new Mac, with the still perfectly good PC being given away to the thrift.
Now I'm advising everyone who really wants Windows 10 to either wait a year as usual until it becomes usable, or get a Mac, install VMWare, and set up a Windows image.
To be fair, they could also install VMWare on their current Windows 7 (or 8?) machine and set up the Windows 10 VM in it.