Windows 7 Linux Edition2014 Created By Team OS

Linux Edition2014 Created By Team OS Update And Telemetry

Aging PCs, if theyre replaced at all, are likely to be swapped out for iPads and Macs (and perhaps even Chromebooks) rather than a Windows PC from Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Microsoft.

Among pundits and analysts, this number is often treated as authoritative and precise.

It is not. It is, rather, an aspirational bit of rhetoric, called forth when Microsofts senior management wants to emphasize the sheer size of the Windows customer base to motivate its workforce or rev up its partners.

Satya Nadellas invocation at a Windows 10 event in January 2016 is a perfect example of the genre.

I believe that 1.5 billion number has shrunk quite a bit in the past few years.

The rise of Windows 10 Microsoft executives have, unsurprisingly, focused mostly on the growth of its Windows 10 installed base, reporting steady growth over the past five years.

Linux Edition2014 Created By Team OS Update And Telemetry

The company can be extremely confident about that metric, thanks to the update and telemetry components built into every copy of Windows 10.

As my colleague Mary Jo Foley notes regularly, Microsofts monthly active devices metric counts devices that have been in contact with Microsofts servers in the past 28 days.) See also: Windows 10 telemetry secrets: Where, when, and why Microsoft collects your data These statements are also material representations from a publicly traded company, so theyre vetted by lawyers and likely to be accurate.

Making a material misrepresentation about the performance of a core business unit is the sort of thing that brings down the wrath of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As of September 24, 2019, Microsoft officials said that more than 900 million active devices were running Windows 10.

That figure includes 40-50 million Xbox One consoles, an insignificant number of HoloLens and Surface Hub devices, and a rapidly shrinking population of Windows Phones.

After making those adjustments, lets call it 850 million Windows 10 PCs.

Given those trends, its reasonable to project that the number of active Windows 10 devices will be over a billion by the end of the first calendar quarter of 2020.

But how does that number compare to the current Windows installed base After reviewing all the available evidence, Im convinced that the current installed base of Windows PCs as we head into 2020 is down significantly since its peak and is probably close to 1.2 billion today.

Erosion of the Windows installed base A decade ago, when the PC era was in full swing, Microsoft executives regularly shared the companys estimates of how many Windows PCs were in use worldwide.

For example, then-CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts in mid-2007 that the Windows installed base was approaching 1 billion and that the company expected to cross that threshold by mid-2008.

The reported number of Windows users went up to 1.25 billion at the end of 2011 and had increased again to 1.5 billion by the end of 2014.

Five years later, that public number has not gone up, and executives rarely mention it.

In short, if youre looking for the highwater mark in the PC era, 2014 is a pretty good place to zero in.

Every bit of available data since that time says the Windows installed base is declining, although probably not as steeply as it grew in its heyday.

One obvious deduction from that 2015 number is the population of roughly 70 million Windows Phones, almost all of which have long since been retired or replaced.

Businesses are mostly in PC replacement mode, often using hardware upgrades as an excuse to migrate PCs to a new operating system.

One of the biggest replacement cycles in enterprise PCs in recent memory is happening now, as companies and government institutions migrate their workers from older Windows versions (mostly Windows 7) to Windows 10.

Some old machines are being retired and are not being replaced, especially in the consumer space.

Enthusiasts who used to have multiple PCs now have only one or two.

In consumer households, smartphones and tablets are handling the majority of computing tasks these days.

Windows 7 Linux Edition2014 Created By Team Os