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Microsoft: Windows 10 Won't Hit 1 Billion Devices By Mid-2018 (zdnet.com)
Despite Microsoft's aggressive efforts to get everyone to upgrade to Windows 10 by mid-2018, the company says it is unlikely to meet its self-imposed deadline. In a statement to ZDNet, the company said: Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350M monthly active devices, with record customer satisfaction and engagement. We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices. In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices -- and increasing customer delight with Windows. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley writes: Microsoft Windows and Devices chief Terry Myerson made the original claim at Build 2015, noting that the 1 billion figure would encompass all kinds of devices that would run Windows 10 in some variant, including desktops, PCs, laptops, tablets, Windows Phones, Xbox One gaming consoles, Surface Hub conferencing systems, HoloLens augmented reality glasses and various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Officials said at that time that the majority of those 1 billion devices would be PCs and tablets. But Windows Phones running Windows 10 Mobile also were expected to help Microsoft reach that total by mid-2018.Since April 2015, the bottom has fallen out of the Windows Phone market, with Microsoft officials conceding that Windows Phone isn't much of a focus for Microsoft in calendar 2016.
Strange, all I hear are complaints and requests to put Windows 7 back on. The #1 complaint I've heard is that wifi stops working reliably in W10.
Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350M monthly active devices, with record customer satisfaction and engagement. We're pleased with our progress to date, ... our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices ... increasing customer delight with Windows.
Sure, we forced/tricked many of those people into updating from an older, acceptable version of Windows. And we're really pleased with all the "telemetry" we're receiving about everything - seriously, everything - everyone is doing on their systems and showing them ads and charging them for Solitaire, etc... (and we will be doing all that even for people that actually purchase their copy of Windows 10). But we won't truly be happy until we've got a *Billlllllion* (as voiced by Car Sagan) systems running Windows 10. That will really increase the delight of our customers - you know, the advertising and marketing folks.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...that the people who want Windows 10 or can easily be tricked into installing it have already done so. If you're still running windows 7 now, it's for a reason.
And it took malware-like behaviour on top of actual malware to do it.
If there was no "free" upgrade, and Microsoft never forced, or even simply "offered" an upgrade, inside 7/8.1.. How many devices do you think would actually be running Windows 10?
OK. now subtract all the new PCs that people didn't have a choice on or were sold with Windows 10 license but downgraded (extortion of OEMs is a separate matter), mobile and 'touch only' tablets (because irrelevant), consoles (because Xbox isn't a 'real' PC in the traditional sense), and volume license agreements (automatically includes Windows 10 licenses for every seat for desktop OS, even when hardly anyone actually wanted it or uses it). Now subtract all those who were compensated in some way or received Windows 10 as part of something else (MSDN, Technet, freebies or paid shill)
This leaves exactly seventeen people worldwide who actually intentionally upgraded to Windows 10 on their own, and were not paid to it, were not forced to do it, did not have a 10 license handed to them as part of something else, and would have even paid the $100 for the upgrade.
Yup, sounds like an historic success story to me.
Windows 10 is the first Windows I've bothered to use much. I tried XP for a while and went back to Mandrake. Vista was dog balls. 7 was back to being XP. 8.1 was absolute garbage; I used it for Unity 3D for a while. Windows 10 surprised me by having a modern, useful interface with surprisingly-fewer flaws than all prior versions of Windows (useless Start menu search; Virtual desktops don't allow me to ctrl-alt-shift move windows; no exploded workspace view a la Gnome 3, although the alt-tab interface is better than Gnome 3), and by being an actual, competent OS.
Soon I'll get rid of Cygwin in favor of Ubuntu on Windows 10.
If it could just act as an iSCSI initiator at the home desktop level, I'd run it on a diskless machine with a cheap, low-capacity M2 and use FreeNAS to back its main program and data drive. Too bad the Windows installer can't do sensible things like mount a disk over C:\Program Files.
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On Wall Street, if you're not at least x% higher in net income than the year before, you're unsuccessful. That's regardless of how much net profit you did make, market saturation, or even world events that might have impacted your business.