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Windows 10 Now on 600 Million Active Devices (geekwire.com)

Posted by msmash on from the nothing-like-anything dept.

Windows 10 has found its way onto 600 million active devices, says CEO Satya Nadella. From a report: CEO Satya Nadella referenced the new number for the first time moments ago at the company's annual shareholders meeting. The number is up from the 500 million devices touted by Microsoft earlier this year, but it's still well short of the company's original goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices within two to three years of its 2015 release.

8 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Good leadership at the helm... by rwven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It can't be understated how good of a job MS has done with Win10 and the company's direction as a whole in the past few years. Placing Nadella at the helm, and getting rid of Balmer has been a real boon to the company. I know this probably makes me sound like a MS shill, but having spent multiple years in the Linux desktop scene, macOS, and windows, the current windows OS is by far the best OS I've ever used.

    While the target of 1B devices might be a little bit of a pipe dream, they still have another year to hit their goal, and if they don't, it's not like it's even remotely a failure.

    I still can't deny that Ubuntu 17.10 is very tempting though...

    1. Re:Good leadership at the helm... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As far as price/utility, Ubuntu 17 is pretty good. It's free. It doesn't send my personal data outside my machine by default. It doesn't try to nudge me to use Microsoft's (or anyone else's) servers for storage of personal info.

      And it comes with a decent (OK, not great) office suite, graphic edition, media software, etc, etc built in. What's really missing is an Outlook equivalent, but with web-based email solutions, this is less relevant. (Strictly for email, I connect Thunderbird to the uni Exchange servers.)

    2. Re:Good leadership at the helm... by rwven · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sounds like you're quoting a bunch of ignorant drivel from the Vista days...

      - It's extremely fast. It cold boots for me in 5 seconds after posting is complete. I'd also like to see your competing system run graphics intensive tasks using the latest and greatest graphics hardware and even have a chance of competing. "Slow" is about the stupidest and most ignorant claim about Windows 10 that I've ever heard.
      - Installing software is a nightmare? I guess clicking an icon and clicking "Next" is too complex for some people... Definitely SO much harder than mounting a virtual drive on your machine, extracting an app from it, dragging that app to an arbitrary folder (or running an installer), and then unmounting the drive.
      - "I can't move an app after I install it!" is a fake complaint and probably identifies you as an angry mac user. You never move an app after you install it anyway, and don't lie and pretend you do. They sit right in the Applications folder the way they always have. That's not an issue.
      - Are you really complaining that there's a welcome screen after major OS updates that says "Hi!"? Apple plays a frigging theme video after their major OS updates, and Linux often just indiscriminately breaks or uninstalls half the crap you had installed.
      - The "List of installed apps" is only confusing if you're a toddler. It's an alphabetized list of your installed apps. If that doesn't make sense to you, then you very well may be beyond help. Compare that with a mac, and you end up with garbage files spewed all over your Library that you know nothing about, and are effectively there forever, even if you decide to get rid of the application itself. Even most linux distros do a better job of keeping track of the mess they makes.
      - Windows was free for me, five times over, and whether or not something is "cool" is irrelevant to how good it is at its job. Skateboards are cool. They also suck as cross country vehicles.

  2. Had to give it away by Revek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When that didn't work they forced it on you.

    1. Re:Had to give it away by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Informative

      Windows 10 is not free now, and in fact was never really free. It was a free upgrade only for already-paid-for versions of Windows, and that offer has long since expired. If you want to install it today on a new machine, it will cost you $120-$200. Buying a Windows license doesn't give you a perpetual lifetime license either. It only gives you a license for the lifetime of your machine.

      Microsoft probably realized that the vast majority of people buy a machine and never upgrade Windows. So, they just changed their business model to better fit this reality, and at the same time, made things easier on themselves by ensuring they're only supporting one OS version going forward.

      I'm always a bit surprised by the "Windows is free" mantra. Microsoft only eliminated paid updates, which I suspect wasn't a huge money-maker anyhow, and will likely be partially offset by reduced maintenance costs. With those numbers, assuming only half those are desktop PCs, and even with an average of once a decade machine replacement, Microsoft is still likely grossing several billion a year on new license fees alone..

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  3. And they still haven't gotten a clue by ilsaloving · · Score: 5, Informative

    And the most important thing to remember is that if people had the choice of installing Windows 7 on new machines, the Win10 numbers wouldn't even be THAT high.

    The only reason people are installing Windows 10 is because they have no choice. Not only is it not that particularly compelling, but there are so many downsides, that people are actively resisting using it.

    I know I won't allow it at our company until we've implemented a full deployment plan including blocking all of Microsoft telemetry IP addresses, and set up a WSUS server with a VERY conservative update schedule. Microsoft has fucked up SO many updates, SO regularly, that they cannot be trusted. This probably also means we'll be forced to subscribe to their Windows 10 Enterprise nonsense since they removed so much of the GPO functionality from Pro.

  4. 34 million of them are currently updating by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And 34 million of them are currently locked on a forced update in the middle of the workday. Thank you Jesu^b^b^bMicrosoft!

  5. Re:windows 10 ... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Informative

    Of course there are, but having to resort to them to do something that should exist out of the box is ridiculous.