There Are Now 500 Million Windows 10 Powered Devices

Microsoft will say at some point today that over 500 million devices now run on Windows 10 up 150 million from eight months ago and up 390 million from October 2015. Released on the 29^th of June 2015, Windows 10 broke another record when Microsoft reported that Windows 10 powered 14 million devices within 24 hours of release (partly because they allowed users upgrade to the new operating system for free initially) The announcement is expected to come sometime today at Microsoft’s Build developer event in Seattle.

But all of this comes as Microsoft predicted just before it launched Windows 10 that it expects the operating system to be installed on 1 billion devices by 2018. But even Microsoft now admits that this isn’t feasible because and in a statement last year, Windows marketed head Yusef Medhi says “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.”

That said, analysts had predicted that Windows 10 will be running on 550 million devices by June 2017 with another 25 million added in September 2017 putting the total figure by September at 575 million.

Maybe the growth has slowed because of the end of the free upgrade offer but another factor could be because of the overall decline in the number of people buying new devices. Research Company Gartner reported back in May 2016 that PC shipments declined 9.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2016 and put in real figures, about 64.8 million units of PCs were shipped and that also translated to the first quarter since 2007 of shipments less than 65 million.