Roger Fingas
A little over five months since its official release date, Windows 10 is now installed on over 200 million devices worldwide, Microsoft said in a Monday announcement.
Adoption of the OS is easily outpacing both Windows 7 and 8, the company added. Its growth has been just under 140 percent faster than Windows 7, and more almost four times faster than Windows 8. Over 40 percent of new Windows 10 devices have been activated since Black Friday.
Windows 8 was a deeply unpopular release for many PC owners, as it defaulted to a touch-oriented homescreen interface regardless of what device it was installed on. Windows 10 boots to a traditional desktop view in most cases, and adds more features such as Cortana voice assistance and the Edge web browser. People have complained, however, about behind-the-scenes data collection that must be manually disabled.
The speed of Windows 10 adoption is most likely linked to Microsoft making it a free upgrade for the first year, combined with it being included on new laptop, desktop, and tablet PCs. Although Macs have gained marketshare, Windows is still by far the world's most popular computer platform.
The free upgrade strategy in fact mimics Apple's approach with OS X, and will likely be necessary to meet Microsoft's goal of having Windows 10 on a billion devices in 2018. That includes not just PCs but smartphones, although Windows phones have largely failed to catch on so far.
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29 Comments
???? "...Windows is still by far the world's most popular computer platform."
CORRECTION: Windows has the world's largest installed desktop computer base by far, but Apple OS X remains the world's most popular desktop platform based on overall consumer satisfaction levels. Further, when looking at all computing platforms vs desktop, one needs to include Apple's mobile OS, which changes the picture dramatically for computing OS market share. For MSFT and their mobile offerings, not so much. (After all, our mobile devices are now advanced computers!)
Define "computer platform". Windows is only on about 13% of electronic devices today. UNIX based systems dominate computing.
It's nice for them to leave out the fact that many people were duped into installing Windows 10 because of that lovely Trojan horse Microshit shoved onto our Windows machines via Windows Updates! That constantly uses our machines as non-sanctioned BitTorrent distro machines for Windows 10 installers, and how people can't get rid of it! Of course adoption numbers are this high when they are conning people into upgrading! Microshit has now become the biggest bunch of crooks out there, and as expected, Wall Street is loving them for it and rewarding them.
@sog35 - Your "copy" and "paste" keys have been taking a hell of a beating recently... you should try the "cut" one more often!