Microsoft: Windows 10 Won't Hit 1 Billion Devices By Mid-2018 (zdnet.com) 104
Despite Microsoft's aggressive efforts to get everyone to upgrade to Windows 10 by mid-2018, the company says it is unlikely to meet its self-imposed deadline. In a statement to ZDNet, the company said: 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. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley writes: Microsoft Windows and Devices chief Terry Myerson made the original claim at Build 2015, noting that the 1 billion figure would encompass all kinds of devices that would run Windows 10 in some variant, including desktops, PCs, laptops, tablets, Windows Phones, Xbox One gaming consoles, Surface Hub conferencing systems, HoloLens augmented reality glasses and various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Officials said at that time that the majority of those 1 billion devices would be PCs and tablets. But Windows Phones running Windows 10 Mobile also were expected to help Microsoft reach that total by mid-2018.Since April 2015, the bottom has fallen out of the Windows Phone market, with Microsoft officials conceding that Windows Phone isn't much of a focus for Microsoft in calendar 2016.
Windows Phone? (Score:2)
It was a while since I even saw such a device offered in a shop.
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I actually know more people with a Blackberry than with a Windows phone. Ok, I know one person with a Blackberry, so...
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We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business
They're "focusing" on their dozens of customers.
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From those figures it sounds like Windows Phone is experiencing explosive growth! No one else can claim 600% YoY growth!
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I know you're being funny here (and obviously it whooshed right over some other mod's heads), but it always cracks me up when people quote ridiculously high percentages of growth.
It's fantastically easy to have 1200% growth when your starting position is one customer.
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The "country" of Redmond, Washington?
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I know one person with WP, I think the winning feature for him was the camera as apparently Nokia's hardware division does something right. But I don't think he's a trendsetter, to put it that way...
Re: Windows Phone? (Score:1)
I saw two dudes in a Starbucks with windows phones so I asked what was up. They both worked for Microsoft.
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Were they also fanny bandits?
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I know one person with a Windows Phone. He likes it. I agree, it's not a bad phone. The gawdawful interface put onto the PCs actually makes sense on a phone and is very usable. And combined with a very nice Nokia made phone it's a nice product. The commonly listed drawback" is having few apps but that's not really much of a problem given how most apps are crap anyway. The only real drawback in my view is the knowledge that it will never take off and you're stuck with a dead-end product.
Other than the UI
Poor Microsoft... (Score:2)
Re:Poor Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
On Wall Street, if you're not at least x% higher in net income than the year before, you're unsuccessful. That's regardless of how much net profit you did make, market saturation, or even world events that might have impacted your business.
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I didn't realize we only measured 'success' based upon what Wall Street thinks.
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I didn't realize we only measured 'success' based upon what Wall Street thinks.
For large corporations we do. If you don't make that crowd happy you'll find yourself subject to takeover attempts, boardroom shakeups, and activist investors.
Life is really easier for a privately held company, because they can just say "because it's our business, fuck you" to their critics.
Satisfaction? Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange, all I hear are complaints and requests to put Windows 7 back on. The #1 complaint I've heard is that wifi stops working reliably in W10.
Re:Satisfaction? Heh. (Score:4, Funny)
Well, the only thing people using W10 are satisfied with is the lack of an install-W10-now nag screen.
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So, only thing microsoft has to do is to add more nag-screens to non W10, and W10 users will be satisfied!
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Well, the only thing people using W10 are satisfied with is the lack of an install-W10-now nag screen.
You are quite right, but little do they know is the Win10 now phones home every time you fire up the operating system which the average user is not aware off.
Wait I hear you say but I can lock down Win10 so that it does not phone home. My answer is "Are your really sure of that?". As a simple test, you need to be running an operating system that you can definitely be sure that it is not sending packets to miscellaneous sites. I use WireShark [wireshark.org] since it is very good and it's also free). A Linux distro is
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I have frankly no idea why you wrote this as a reply to me.
But it is kinda funny that one of my current jobs is to find out pretty much what you laid out in your posting, just that I have a few ... other means at my disposal.
Btw, I do fire up a network analyzer. At work. And no, I'm not worried about my boss finding out. Actually, he'd probably want to know what the hell I'm doing all day if I don't use one...
Re:Satisfaction? Heh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Strange, all I hear are complaints and requests to put Windows 7 back on. The #1 complaint I've heard is that wifi stops working reliably in W10.
"Record customer satisfaction". Notice they don't say what direction. And I'm sure tweets of "Microsoft you suck" count as engagement as well.
a matter of definition (Score:3)
Users of Windows 10 are the merchandise, not customers.
Re: Satisfaction? Heh. (Score:1)
I'm sure people are record-breakingly satisfied, but we're talking about Microsoft here. It's not like the bar was set at a respectable level.
And as for the people who actually are satisfied, we're talking about Microsoft customers here. It's not like their demands are set at a respectable level.
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WiFi has been wonky for me since Windows 8. Windows 10 upgrade actually reduced the number of WiFi failures for me. Still a lot more problematic than Windows 7 though. Got to the point where I just ran a wire to my main desktop because the connection would be lost once every few days and requires a reboot to get it back.
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Funny that. When 7 came out all I heard were complaints and requests to put windows XP back on.
Users are terrible at adapting to change, even if it's 'my excel icon looks different, wtf I can't do my job'.
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The laptops I looked at dropped wifi every 20-30 seconds. They all seem to be Intel wifi cards and no driver update was able to fix it. These users were complaining because they couldn't acutally *use* their computer.
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I'd be curious to know who made the laptop.
I've got a couple laptops (very old Dell, newer Lenovo) that I moved to 10 and no issues. My old HP (running 7) drops wi-fi more often than that, but that's a hardware issue with the actual 'toggle'.
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I have fixed Lenovo, HP, Dell, LG, and Toshiba laptops that have had this issue. They were different models of Intel wifi cards, so I'm thinking there must be an issue with the wifi driver itself.
I even tried it on my old LG laptop with Intel wifi and it had the wifi disconnect/reconnect issue. Hell, on my laptop sometime it initially wouldn't even connect to wifi unless you rebooted it 3-4 times.
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Funny that. When 7 came out all I heard were complaints and requests to put windows XP back on.
Users are terrible at adapting to change, even if it's 'my excel icon looks different, wtf I can't do my job'.
How quickly people forget.
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Record satisfaction? hahaha
I have had two customers of large businesses say to me "get the fucking windows 10 bullshit of the machines and put windows 7 on so we can actually get work done"
Billions of devices (Score:2)
"I felt a great disturbance in the internet , as if millions of devices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear Windows 10 force upgrade has happened."
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Windows 10 sucks. I turned on my laptop (only used when traveling) and it killed our available bandwidth. There doesn't appear to be a way to throttle it configuration wise but I did limit it from my router's side. Finding anything is difficult and getting rid of their apps that keep showing back up after every stupid update is infuriating.
Who are these satisfied customers they speak of?
You can lock down Windows 10. The Security settings are a great place to start although you can download applications (if you can trust them) that can help with the registry settings as well.
Dear Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear Microsoft,
I understand that you have to meet a target goal of 1 billion Windows 10 device installs by mid-2018 and that you are aggressively pursuing this goal by becoming even more of a pain in the ass than is typical.
I have a few old laptops.
If I download and install Windows 10 one billion times, changing my MAC address each time, then will you SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LEAVE EVERYONE ALONE!?!
Respectfully,
A.C.
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VMware, PowerCLI, automate the whole damn thing.
Should take half an hour to write a script. Run 10000 in parallel, be done in a few weeks.
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VMware, PowerCLI, automate the whole damn thing.
Should take half an hour to write a script. Run 10000 in parallel, be done in a few weeks.
Try and score some free Azure time and run it on there!
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We did at my previous job. $60,000 of credit. Used up in 1 month, with the equivalent of what $50k in hardware could do. For years.
Cloud services are not a good financial decision if you're doing it at scale.
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oh you figured me out!!! i was only doing it 350 million times a month though.
Has to be said (Score:2)
Re:Has to be said (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 10 is the first Windows I've bothered to use much. I tried XP for a while and went back to Mandrake. Vista was dog balls. 7 was back to being XP. 8.1 was absolute garbage; I used it for Unity 3D for a while. Windows 10 surprised me by having a modern, useful interface with surprisingly-fewer flaws than all prior versions of Windows (useless Start menu search; Virtual desktops don't allow me to ctrl-alt-shift move windows; no exploded workspace view a la Gnome 3, although the alt-tab interface is better than Gnome 3), and by being an actual, competent OS.
Soon I'll get rid of Cygwin in favor of Ubuntu on Windows 10.
If it could just act as an iSCSI initiator at the home desktop level, I'd run it on a diskless machine with a cheap, low-capacity M2 and use FreeNAS to back its main program and data drive. Too bad the Windows installer can't do sensible things like mount a disk over C:\Program Files.
Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
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, ... our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices ... increasing customer delight with Windows.
Sure, we forced/tricked many of those people into updating from an older, acceptable version of Windows. And we're really pleased with all the "telemetry" we're receiving about everything - seriously, everything - everyone is doing on their systems and showing them ads and charging them for Solitaire, etc... (and we will be doing all that even for people that actually purchase their copy of Windows 10). But we won't truly be happy until we've got a *Billlllllion* (as voiced by Car Sagan) systems running Windows 10. That will really increase the delight of our customers - you know, the advertising and marketing folks.
Something tells me... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that the people who want Windows 10 or can easily be tricked into installing it have already done so. If you're still running windows 7 now, it's for a reason.
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Don't forget Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. too. ;)
"hottest start in history" (Score:5, Insightful)
And it took malware-like behaviour on top of actual malware to do it.
If there was no "free" upgrade, and Microsoft never forced, or even simply "offered" an upgrade, inside 7/8.1.. How many devices do you think would actually be running Windows 10?
OK. now subtract all the new PCs that people didn't have a choice on or were sold with Windows 10 license but downgraded (extortion of OEMs is a separate matter), mobile and 'touch only' tablets (because irrelevant), consoles (because Xbox isn't a 'real' PC in the traditional sense), and volume license agreements (automatically includes Windows 10 licenses for every seat for desktop OS, even when hardly anyone actually wanted it or uses it). Now subtract all those who were compensated in some way or received Windows 10 as part of something else (MSDN, Technet, freebies or paid shill)
This leaves exactly seventeen people worldwide who actually intentionally upgraded to Windows 10 on their own, and were not paid to it, were not forced to do it, did not have a 10 license handed to them as part of something else, and would have even paid the $100 for the upgrade.
Yup, sounds like an historic success story to me.
I've met a lot of (Score:2)
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Common complaints following the "Upgrade" : Stuff doesn't work, computer so slow it's unusable, how do I delete/uninstall all this crap that I don't want or use?
A: You can't.
What a crock!
I lost interest after XP.
Due to what now? (Score:2)
...We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business...
What an interesting way of saying "ignoring".
Honestly, given how aggressive MS has been with windows10, I'm a little shocked they don't have more devices.
Uh,,,bragging about force feeding? (Score:2)
"Focusing" of the phone business (Score:2)
A new initiative from Microsoft? (Score:3)
...and increasing customer delight with Windows
Microsoft is going to start trying to make Windows 10 delightful? That's good news, although a bit late in the game.
Hottest start in history? (Score:2)
That's like saying that during the 1940s the Jewish tourist industr in Germany was the "hottest in history".
And, like typical short term thinking corporate drones, they have sacrificed long term viability for short term benefit. Between the unprecedented powers that Microsoft has granted itself over people's computers, the stealing of basic ownership rights people used to enjoy with their computers for the past several decades, and the sheer obnoxiousness of this rollout, has basically destroyed mindshare
I work at Microsoft and the first thing (Score:3)
Not Even with their Decpetion and Coercion? (Score:2)
I don't know what to think. They've been using every scummy trick in the book, and still not yet?
Not if it takes 8 hours to d/l security patches (Score:1)
If they keep up that nightmare, then we're all going Linux.
"record customer satisfaction" (Score:1)
Windows Vista and Windows 10: the Comcast and Time/Warner of operating systems.
... with record customer satisfaction ? (Score:2)
hA (Score:1)
False dichotomy (Score:3)
Did Microsoft just put on record that they're incapable of developing a desktop OS and a phone OS at the same time?
One would think that with their resources, they could afford two competent development teams.
It's not really free (Score:2)
If they really wanted to hit huge numbers they wouldn't mess around with the installations of Windows 7 and Windows 8 users.
They'd offer the damn ISO to download for free to anyone.
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July 16, 2016... (Score:1)