Microsoft is revealing today that 1 billion active machines are now running Windows 10. “Today we’re delighted to announce that over one billion people have chosen Windows 10 across 200 countries resulting in more than one billion active Windows 10 devices,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Modern Life and the Search & Devices Group. “We couldn’t be more grateful to our customers, partners, and employees for helping us get here.”
This number includes PCs, laptops, Xbox One consoles, and HoloLens devices running Microsoft’s latest operating system. It means Microsoft has now hit its original goal of a billion devices running Windows 10, albeit two years later than it originally expected. Microsoft is also revealing that it now has 17.8 million Windows Insider testers.
Between 2015 and 2016, as I wrote at that time “the bottom has fallen out of the Windows Phone market. In addition, Microsoft’s moves to try to get Windows 7 and 8 users to migrate to Windows 10 by offering them a “limited-time” free upgrade an offer which still works for many customers, by the way, using valid product keys didn’t have much of an impact on the total, as relatively few users got a new version of Windows via a manual update. (Most get it via a volume licensing agreement or via a new PC preloaded with a particular new operating system.”
“Today we’re delighted to announce that over one billion people have chosen Windows 10 across 200 countries resulting in more than one billion active Windows 10 devices,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice president of Modern Life, Search and Devices, in a March 16 blog post.
Microsoft officials also said as of now the company has 17.8 million registered Windows Insider testers, though, according to my contacts, only a small fraction of this number actually regularly test Windows 10 feature update builds before they’re released. And Windows 10 currently runs on more than 80,000 different PC configurations and models, today’s blog post states.
