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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."
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.
That's 5 % of 5 %. It's important to get the maths right.
I wonder how many of those are new Surface computers ready to be shipped.
maths fail. it is not 4.91% of a billion machines. it is 4.91% of their market share, which is less than 100,000. So at best that is 4.9 million, in reality much much lower.
Sure, you can disable the telemetry.. I have a laptop drive with the released version of 10, which I "castrated" with one of the tools available to do the job, and after watching what the system "talked" to afterwards, via an instance of rpcapd on my router, I could find no traffic to/from the many "telemetry" addresses that an UN-castrated install would be talking to, so, at least until MS decides to throw an update out which turns all the spyware features BACK ON, this install of 10 is safe to use... Of course I trust MS about as far as I can throw them, so its just a matter of time before they re-set all the systems that have disabled the spyware "features"... Which is why I'm sooo thankful I dumped Windows after I retired in 2010.. The *only* reason I have a copy of 10 and did the testing I did, is because I'm kind of the local "geek" and get asked about Windows quite a bit...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
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.
That would lead to a great upswing for the Zilog Z80-processor then if MSX is getting an upswing!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"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.
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.
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)
[...] 4.91% of [...] 100,000 [...] is 4.9 million
What were you saying about a maths fail? ;)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Really ? Five systems failed ? Wow.... I'm speechless. I have 2 of 2. Without any effort. I must be extremely lucky.
Out of interest, if you just decline everything and turn off everything in the privacy screen, does Windows 10 actually send anything that isn't commonly sent by other operating systems?
Install/uninstall telemetry - iOS and Android keep track of that, for device restores and app store integration. At least the Windows 10 app store is fully optional.
Voice/handwriting sent to MS - disabled via privacy options, also standard for iOS and Android when doing voice/handwriting input.
Search queries sent to MS - standard for Google search on Android. Not sure about iOS/OS X, does the "spotlight" thing include web results? The privacy setting to turn this off appears to work as expected.
Wifi password sharing - Android backs up encrypted passwords to Google's cloud if you enable backups, presumably iOS does too as it allows you to fully restore your device. This setting is double opt-in and not opting in seems to disable it as expected.
There is some other telemetry stuff going on too, most of which seems to be related to Windows Update. Again, I'm not sure that is anything particularly special, since both Android and iOS check for malware on your device and the other kind of stuff Windows appears to be doing.
I'm not very happy about this stuff and will block it of course, my point is merely that Windows 10 does not appear to be out of the ordinary these days and rather than ranting at Microsoft we probably need to be thinking more generally about private computing. Stallman gets more right every year, it seems.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.
What a crappy insulting and sad little post you've written there.
btw a Windows installation is something useful/needed even if once in a blue moon, if only to chkdsk an ntfs drive.
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!!!!
Shill... real fake
You think he's shilling? Shilling for who? Shilling for some company that markets a telemetry blocker? By being kind of vague about everything? By not naming any names whatsoever?
Maybe you mean he's shilling for Microsoft, by saying that their particular brand of data cancer is sometimes survivable with expensive and careful treatment? By saying, twice, that he suspects that Microsoft, black-hearted as they are, will immediately undo his fixes with the next release?
Or is he shilling for Linux? Yeah, okay, I'd buy that. But isn't being a Linux shill on Slashdot like being a Mormon missionary who's trying to convert the Tabernacle Choir? Plus, can you really shill for something that nobody charges for?
Is he a shill because he claims to be a geek with too much time on his hands? Because this is such an implausible backstory for a Slashdot user?
If this guy's a shill, he's the most amazingly subtle shill I've ever heard of. My God, this means they're learning! Of course, it's so clear now, this is just phase one of his master plan. In the grim future of shilling, we won't be able to tell who the shills are, because they won't actually be shilling for anything!
I can see only one solution. We must, as a group, immediately condemn this "geeky" "retiree" for the fraud he is, on the say-so of an anonymous tipster. Slashdot needs to suspend his account, immediately!
Wait... wait... am... am I a shill? Please, comrades, tell me, I must know!
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.
.. I have a laptop drive with the released version of 10, which I "castrated" ...
Are you saying that the telemetry data reporting is the testicles of Windows 10?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
"Your chilling willingness for shilling is killing us!"
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.
No, it isn't 4.91% of their OS market share. It's 4.91% of all the machines on the net, of which Windows and OS X are both going to be pretty much mostly there. Read again. "Desktop Operating System Market Share" -- OS X has 4.91% of the desktop market against other operating systems and the billion computers is a likely very conservative number for "desktop market."
Your fail, fails, I think.
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 privacy setting to turn this off appears to work as expected.
How did you come up with that conclusion? I have both web search and Cortana disabled. Cortana is actually disabled forcefully as "not available in my country". Yet if I hit the windows key and type something I straight away start sending data to bing.com. Now regardless of whether this contains any usable data at all the expectation is if its disabled it won't communicate, and since Microsoft hasn't come up with any explanation of the format of what is being sent we can only assume the worst: information specifically identifying the machine.
Now as to your comparison to "other operating systems" please actually compare it to operating systems. What you're comparing it to is phones, which if you look back you'll see we complain just as much about. "Other's do it" is not an excuse, especially if those "others" are an order of magnitude different in scope of personal data or priority of their service, i.e. my phone doesn't handle highly sensitive banking information (at least MY phone doesn't), my computer does. If you run AOSP you don't get any of this endless telemetry data. If you run any flavour of Linux or Unix you don't get any of this endless telemetry data. If you run prior versions of Windows you don't get this either as long as you've sanitised your windows updates.
Well, it produces a bunch of data which can be used to identify the machine, and it gets released somewhere every now and then, so the comparison is appropriate.
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.
I am picturing you whirling chickens right now. Is whirling chickens over your head insulting?
I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm tempted to steal this for my sig. It has a certain insane poetry to it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.