Slashdot Mirror


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."

22 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Loaded title. by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With how aggressively they pushed it is there any reason to be skeptical?

    1. Re:Loaded title. by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 2

      Exactly. I keep a Win 8.1 image around to see what the scumbags are up to, and after having uninstalled and hidden their updates related to Win 10 they actually unhid them and had those "optional" updates checked so that if I didn't do the research they would be re-installed again. All this says is that 100 Million or so people have no idea what they are getting into with this garbage, and / or clicked on the icon to make it finally go away for good. This is tantamount to me running around and throwing garbage in all the neighbors yard, and throwing it back when they remove it until they finally give up, and then claiming: "Hey look! All my neighbors chose to have garbage in their yard! There needs to be an investigation into this, which equates to yet more unethical if not illegal behavior on the part of Microsoft.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    2. Re:Loaded title. by dwywit · · Score: 2

      Well idiot W10 is a fine operating system

      No, no it's not. My income since 29th July has increased, mainly due to sorting out issues caused by Windows 10.

      I'm not objecting to it for obvious reasons, but to call it a fine operating system is just incorrect.

      If you're going to push a "free" upgrade to people, and boast of its improvements and superiority, you'd better make sure that commonly-used programs (such as Google Chrome) migrate seamlessly, or at least leave a message or log about things that went wrong, so i don't have to spend hours diagnosing the problem.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    3. Re:Loaded title. by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 3, Interesting

      after having uninstalled and hidden their updates related to Win 10 they actually unhid them and had those "optional" updates checked so that if I didn't do the research they would be re-installed again.

      They've also yet again pushed out the Win10 nagware update, KB 3035583, and marked it Important to it's automatically (re-)installed even if you got rid of it the previous times they've forced it on you. This was within the last day or two, so check your PC to see whether it's been re-infected recently.

  2. Thank you but NO! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Thank you but NO! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Clearly you've missed the articles where Microsoft have pushed apps out to Windows 10 users specifically to spam notifications such as "Get Office" as the most aggressive offender.

      There are also the obvious examples of adverts in the Music, Video, Xbox and Store apps encouraging you to buy the corresponding media.

  3. Re:try me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's 5 % of 5 %. It's important to get the maths right.

  4. Re:try me by bloodhawk · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. Re:try me by LVSlushdat · · Score: 3, Informative

    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..)
  6. Amazing news! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Amazing news! by labnet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You must be a paid shill.
      Microsoft has bad karma; it is the great squid aka the Goldman-sachs of the computer world. The mobile space is the first time the consumer has had a chance to stick it to the man, although a lot of us are still suffering Stockholm syndrome.

      --
      46137
    2. Re:Amazing news! by narcc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's the most foolish argument I've ever seen. "It's too late".

      Apple and Google were "too late" to the smartphone market. Microsoft was "too late" to the game console and tablet markets. It hasn't stopped them from being incredibly successful.

      Market leaders change all the time. Why do you think now is the first time in history where the market is settled and new players don't stand a chance of succeeding?

    3. Re:Amazing news! by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2
      True, cos the biggest problem I seem with the majority of android phones in the market, they won't be getting any O/S upgrades and they get old real fast.

      Well MS has solved that one: After the experience of forced upgrades to Windows 10, most people will be desperately trying to avoid anything resembling an upgrade for the rest of their lives.

      You would be surprised how many people buying low end Android phones have never used an app, and probably can't even spell it. They buy phones to make phone calls (Oh, the horror of it). Many would love to return to an old style Nokia, if only Nokia were there to sell them one. A lot buy used Nokias on Ebay - check the price of an E52.

      Most people who care about upgrades will probably know abut CM by now anyway.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  7. Re:I'm waiting for [Windows 11] by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Funny

    Just install Windows 8.0 and then Windows 3.0.

  8. Re:Kinda makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's could HAVE, not could of.

  9. Re:New Surfaces by omtinez · · Score: 2

    Zero, since they are only counting devices activated through the Windows Store

  10. Re:Probably not real numbers by omtinez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not only has Microsoft captured the "telemetry of uninstalling" but it's also some of the most exhaustively examined data. As far as I understand it, the main reason for rolling back appears to be driver issues.

  11. activations by shaitand · · Score: 2

    "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.

    1. Re:activations by CoderFool · · Score: 2

      activations doesn't mean machines running windows 10. I have three machines that I 'activated' with windows 10, but only one still running it. one win7 machine I have I upgraded to win10, but it kept crashing, and then automatically reverted itself to win7 (weird, but cool, though I had a win7 backup I could have used). one win8 machine I have I upgraded, but enough software (even though supposedly win10 ready) broke when I went to win10 that I reverted it to win8. The third, formerly win7, is still running win10 and doing fine. If they are counting activations as running copies, they are way off.

  12. you are asking for more bad behavior in the future by Endymion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  13. Yes, but is is running well? by Simulant · · Score: 4, Informative


    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.

  14. I have tried installing it on 5 computers so far by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.