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Microsoft Operating Systems Stats Upgrades Windows

Microsoft Claims 110M Devices Now Run Windows 10 (computerworld.com) 171

Posted by samzenpus from the bigger-numbers dept.
New submitter enterpriseITrocks writes: Computerworld reports that Windows 10 is running on 110 million devices, citing stats provided by Panos Panay, the chief of the Surface team. It's the first time since late August that Microsoft has provided usage stats for Win10 at a time when the new OS was running on 75 million machines. From the article: "Microsoft's 110 million described those running Windows 10, not downloads, the company confirmed. A spokeswoman declined to describe how the company tracks uptake, but presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs."
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Microsoft Claims 110M Devices Now Run Windows 10 More

Microsoft Claims 110M Devices Now Run Windows 10

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  • Loaded title. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Njorthbiatr ( 3776975 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @09:12PM (#50683371)

    With how aggressively they pushed it is there any reason to be skeptical?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 )
      Exactly. 50M devices ran the Storm botnet, so it's not an unusual install base for a forced-on-you piece of crapware.

      • I smell sour grapes.
        The download was pushed to people but nobody forced them to click through and do the update. This is the best Windows to date so it is better than whatever version they were running before, and it's free. So why wouldn't people happily click the upgrade button?

    • Exactly. I keep a Win 8.1 image around to see what the scumbags are up to, and after having uninstalled and hidden their updates related to Win 10 they actually unhid them and had those "optional" updates checked so that if I didn't do the research they would be re-installed again. All this says is that 100 Million or so people have no idea what they are getting into with this garbage, and / or clicked on the icon to make it finally go away for good. This is tantamount to me running around and throwing g

      • Re:Loaded title. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Thursday October 08, 2015 @12:03AM (#50683965)

        after having uninstalled and hidden their updates related to Win 10 they actually unhid them and had those "optional" updates checked so that if I didn't do the research they would be re-installed again.

        They've also yet again pushed out the Win10 nagware update, KB 3035583, and marked it Important to it's automatically (re-)installed even if you got rid of it the previous times they've forced it on you. This was within the last day or two, so check your PC to see whether it's been re-infected recently.

  • Accidental install

  • Well of course they know (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    with all the baked in spyware, they know _everything_ about windows10 usage, including every user's secrets and confidential data.

    • Indeed. It cracked me up when I read "A spokeswoman declined to describe how the company tracks uptake". They have like million methods available.

  • Thank you but NO! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @09:23PM (#50683433)
    Thank you for the generous offer of a *FREE* downgrade from my current Windows Ultimate version to Windows 10 Pro but I'm not interested. I've already overpaid for what I've got and FU if you think you can downgrade me to the adware riddled privacy invading crap you are currently peddling.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by batkiwi ( 137781 )

      Where are there ads in windows 10?

      Serious question, I haven't seen any.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Clearly you've missed the articles where Microsoft have pushed apps out to Windows 10 users specifically to spam notifications such as "Get Office" as the most aggressive offender.

        There are also the obvious examples of adverts in the Music, Video, Xbox and Store apps encouraging you to buy the corresponding media.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        Live tiles.

  • I wonder how many of those are new Surface computers ready to be shipped.

  • Amazing news! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Apple is in REAL trouble now. OS X is stagnant, the iPad has flatlined and the Surface is quickly eating its marketshare. Apple's lone strength is the iPhone but even that is now under threat with Microsoft's amazing new phones they just announced and the upcoming iOS and Android compatibility layer. Windows on every platform is poised to reclaim what little ground it has lost and do in both Apple and Linux/Android once and for all.

    • Yeah, just like Intel is poised to claim the mobile CPU market with their latest Atom chips.

      It's a good effort, but it's too late.

      • Re:Amazing news! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by narcc ( 412956 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @10:53PM (#50683767) Journal

        That's the most foolish argument I've ever seen. "It's too late".

        Apple and Google were "too late" to the smartphone market. Microsoft was "too late" to the game console and tablet markets. It hasn't stopped them from being incredibly successful.

        Market leaders change all the time. Why do you think now is the first time in history where the market is settled and new players don't stand a chance of succeeding?

        • It's too late because they tried and didn't even make a dent.

          Of the few manufactures they've convinced to use their chips, they've only done so in a small line of products.

          The smartphone market was a niche before Apple and Google came along. The phone market was dominated by feature phones with a fe high-end Nokia phones and Windows based business oriented smartphones and pocket PC's

          • It's too late because they tried and didn't even make a dent.

            Yep, just like Apple did with the Newton?

            There are plenty of cases where people have tried something before and failed due to technical or social reasons. The Atom lost on technical merits and they are getting stronger by the day.

            Also claiming that Google and Apple were releasing smartphones is utter nonsense. Google and Apple release phones. That's it. They displaced the standard phone and marketed a device at standard people who already had such a phone. If anything their biggest battle was actually the s

            • Blackberry was not doing so well. They were trying to recover from patent lawsuits because apparently "push email" was a patent-able invention in USA.

              It was hard to sell Blackberry's after the patent lawsuits started in 2003ish.

              They almost went bankrupt in 2005/2006, just before the iPhone came out.

    • Re:Amazing news! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by labnet ( 457441 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @10:48PM (#50683729)

      You must be a paid shill.
      Microsoft has bad karma; it is the great squid aka the Goldman-sachs of the computer world. The mobile space is the first time the consumer has had a chance to stick it to the man, although a lot of us are still suffering Stockholm syndrome.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by g01d4 ( 888748 )

        mobile space is the first time the consumer has had a chance to stick it to the man

        I think it's the first time the consumer has had a choice unbiased by what was being used at work. Well, maybe the second time if you count game consoles. Microsoft fully and successfully leveraged the PC business mantle handed to them early on by IBM. The consumer 'never went wrong' buying for home what was being used at work. Same interface, work at home &c.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sootman ( 158191 )

      > the Surface is quickly eating its marketshare

      Citation needed.

      > Windows on every platform is poised to reclaim
      > what little ground it has lost and do in both Apple
      > and Linux/Android once and for all.

      There are about 1B Windows computers in the world vs. about 2B smartphones and tablets. How exactly is losing two-thirds of computing devices "a little ground"? We are a long, long way from the old "95% Windows, 5% Mac" days.

      Thanks for the funniest post I've read all week.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        Eh? They can't really lose what they never had. They never really had the phone market. They did have the tablet market back before it was popular. They could have had the phone market but they're idiots and I'm kind of glad they don't. I assume they're still strong on the desktop but I don't pay much attention any more. I don't actually have any MS software installed. Well, I think mono is installed.

        • Having "the tablet market back before it was popular" is an odd way of putting it. Microsoft produced expensive tablet-style computers running an operating system (XP) that was not well-suited for it. Those things were very niche - a few people found them great, and most weren't interested. The tablet market now is one with tablets less expensive than regular computers, running OSes designed to run on them, with software designed for them. Microsoft was not in that market at all before, IIRC, Windows P

  • School has started. just as many Win7's could of been sold if that were the os installed.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's could HAVE, not could of.

    • Historically about 20 million per month. This is more than 50 million per month which easily makes it the most successful launch of any OS in history. It's already more popular than OSX. It was probably more popular than Linux in the first day.

      • Historically about 20 million per month. This is more than 50 million per month which easily makes it the most successful launch of any OS in history. It's already more popular than OSX. It was probably more popular than Linux in the first day.

        Actually everybody I knew local and distant were beta testers for Windows before it's Win3.1 release (I was Amiga). The number of people who had Win3.1 installed before it's release was pretty much everybody but the few working with OS/2 - as I saw it..

        Yep I'd agree with your assessment.

  • I haven't applied any patches since I learned they're adding their spyware to Win 8.1 updates. Makes me nervous, but I'd rather trust my habits and firewall than Microsoft.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's pretty hilarious that you think you're in any way protected from the mountain of zero day exploits available, to any of the entities that would care, out there.

    • I haven't applied any patches since I learned they're adding their spyware to Win 8.1 updates. Makes me nervous, but I'd rather trust my habits and firewall than Microsoft.

      Sounds ridiculous. Why not just switch to Linux to Mac at that point?

  • I wonder how many of these "activations" or windows 10 installs are people doing what I've done to over a dozen machines - "upgrade" from Windows 7 just to lock-in the permanent Windows 10 activation for that PC in the Microsoft servers during the free year.

    I guarantee Microsoft hasn't captured the "telemetry" of uninstalling (where they have you put in the reason you are going back) for any of these, because then I blow away the Windows 10 with the original disk image, make sure that all of the GWX ads, un

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by omtinez ( 3343547 )
      Not only has Microsoft captured the "telemetry of uninstalling" but it's also some of the most exhaustively examined data. As far as I understand it, the main reason for rolling back appears to be driver issues.

    • Lol. Lets be generous and give you a million people that have purchased Win10 systems and downgraded them to Win7. It's not true because these are usage numbers but whatever. That's still 109 million installs in roughly two months which makes this the most successful launch of any OS in history.

    • I do the same.

    • Similarly, I wonder how many of those were intentional. The malware downloads W10 and pops up windows saying that the free upgrade is only for a short time, with a convenient button. I've never before felt like I could install an OS by clicking on the wrong thing.

  • activations (Score:3)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @11:23PM (#50683855) Journal
    "presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs"

    That would be my guess as well but doesn't tell you if any of them kept Windows 10.

    110 M uses having installed windows 10 is not the same as converting 110M users but MS would spin it that way to helpconvince others people liked 10 and convince developers to target it.

    Someday Microsoft will change tactics and try to just play well within markets instead of trying to use manipulation to get ownership of them... I may not live that long but it would be nice to see.
    • activations doesn't mean machines running windows 10. I have three machines that I 'activated' with windows 10, but only one still running it. one win7 machine I have I upgraded to win10, but it kept crashing, and then automatically reverted itself to win7 (weird, but cool, though I had a win7 backup I could have used). one win8 machine I have I upgraded, but enough software (even though supposedly win10 ready) broke when I went to win10 that I reverted it to win8. The third, formerly win7, is still ru

    • "presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs"

      That would be my guess as well but doesn't tell you if any of them kept Windows 10.

      Actually, given how invasive Win 10 is, I'm inclined to believe Microsoft knows exactly how many systems are actively running it for daily use. In fact, I'd say that's a statistic they're tracking internally day-to-day since they seem to be staking a lot on their ability to monitor how you're using the OS.

  • Booted my dual-boot computer into Windows to try the free upgrade out of curiosity. I usually use Windows once a year, to update my satnav maps (and cure them for not having a linux update option)

  • I believe it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Indeed. They have it installed on 100 million Windows phones before putting them in a landfill.

  • if it had been 110 billion i'd still not be impressed. in the vast majority of cases, it was not chosen. so my question is, in how many cases was window 10 chosen over somthing else?

  • Why wouldn't they? When information starts pouring into their servers about every keystroke you made, your bank account password, how many times a day you wank and what your second cousin had for breakfast, what else could it be but Win10 ratting you out.

    Or maybe a NSA back door.

  • If they are counting activations... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It probably won't be accurate. A lot of people I know, myself included, installed Windows 10 and then removed it within a day or two.

  • Yes, but is is running well? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Simulant ( 528590 ) on Thursday October 08, 2015 @07:52AM (#50685313) Journal

    Not as well as 7 on most of my devices. I will admit it does work fine on single use machines like my HTPC but, even my Surface continues to annoy me with bugs and inconsistencies. They should make unifying (or perhaps completely duplicating functionality) the schizophrenic control panel situation a priority... I absolutely hate the "touch friendly" controls. Toggle switches are an abomination.

    • On my personal computer, I have been running Windows 10 Insider version on the fast ring and I have had very few problems with it. Mostly the issues were related to application compatibility but that was also before Windows 10 was generally released. After release, and official Windows 10 drivers and updates starting coming out these problems dropped off completely.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      This is a problem with Windows 10 in general - vast areas of empty white space on a PC because it has a widescreen monitor which a mobile phone doesn't. Metro tiles which may make sense for a touch device but are just awful for a PC. Calling everything "apps" instead of programs (a bugbear of mine). And IMHO a terrible visual refresh that sucks all the colour out of the icons and replaces them with monochrome line art (icons are white-on-blue or white-on-red or white-on-green, settings screen icons are b

  • I have tried installing it on 5 computers so far (Score:5, Informative)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday October 08, 2015 @10:51AM (#50686547)

    Three were Windows 7 and 8.1 systems. Win 10 went through all the installation motions, with the multiple reboots and auto-downloading a long series of Windows Updates. After all that, the final boot...came back into the old version of Windows without any indication of what Windows 10 objected to in the user's configuration.

    The fourth was a new-in-box Dell Inspiron that came with 10 installed. The setup screens went by routinely until I got to the "Set up a Microsoft Account" step. It required the user's email as the ID, and this user had only one, which he has used for years, but the installer rejected that address on grounds of "Invalid domain" whatever that means. Support told me "That happens all the time" and advised getting a new Gmail address to use, but the user didn't want to complicate his life by doing that. So I backed up to the preceding install screen so I could opt for "Set up without a Microsoft Account." Doing this caused the Windows installer to crash hard, requiring that I restore the entire thing from the recovery partition and start over.

    The fifth Windows 10 install was into a fresh VMWare Fusion image on my own iMac under OS X 10.11. It worked first time. Now I'm advising everyone who really wants Windows 10 to either wait a year as usual until it becomes usable, or get a Mac, install VMWare, and set up a Windows image.

    • That Dell should run Linux just fine. 20 minutes or so to install. The hard part is thinking up a user name and password. You'll have to reboot once, too.

      • Yes, after spending the time restoring the installer from the recovery partition, setup from the "No Microsoft Account" pathway was routine. You just have to know beforehand that your email address will be one of the magic addresses that you cannot use to set up a Microsoft Account, and that you therefore have to use the strongly-discouraged "No Microsoft Account" option.

        • You missed the part where I said I installed Linux.

          • If only I could convince more of my IT customers to go the Linux route on their PCs. Instead, any horrible experience with Windows tends to result in getting a new Mac, with the still perfectly good PC being given away to the thrift.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Smurf ( 7981 )

      Now I'm advising everyone who really wants Windows 10 to either wait a year as usual until it becomes usable, or get a Mac, install VMWare, and set up a Windows image.

      To be fair, they could also install VMWare on their current Windows 7 (or 8?) machine and set up the Windows 10 VM in it.

  • The productization of the customer will continue until morale improves. Nadella is doing everything I feared he would.

  • LOL predictable I think is the word best used here.

  • given the reports that it is auto-downloading without permission?

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