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The mysterious case of the disappearing half billion Windows users
Terry Myerson’s one billion count may have been a slip of the tongue – or was it?
You know what Emerson said about a foolish consistency, yes? Well, something Windows head Terry Myerson said at the Tuesday Windows 10 Event in New York has been hobgobbling my little mind.
You can see it yourself. Crank up the official webcast, and listen closely around 3:30. Myerson says, “When we think about the billion people, all around the world, using Windows…” and goes on to explain how everybody is above average, just like the kids at Lake Wobegon, and thus the next version of Win10 will be made for Creators. Fair enough.
When he said that, I nearly spit out my coffee. For years, Microsoft has been claiming there are 1.5 billion Windows PCs worldwide – and presumably there are more users than PCs. I don’t know if Myerson’s downsizing was a slip of the tongue (highly unlikely, given the thorough vetting all MS speeches receive), a subtle precursor to surprises to come, or a tacit admission of defeat.
I’ve always balked at the “X billion users” number because it’s very squishy – are we talking folks who have ever used Windows, folks who use Windows all the time, or something somewhere in between? The first recitation of the 1.5 billion number that I can find came from Brad Sams, back when he was working for Neowin, when he quoted Tony Prophet in July 2014 as saying there were 1.5 billion “Windows devices” out and about. At the time, Prophet was corporate VP of Windows and search marketing, and certainly would’ve been in a position to know.
Prior to that, Matt Rosoff, writing for Business Insider, reported Microsoft’s Antoine Leblond as saying there were 1.25 billion Windows PCs in late 2011.
Microsoft has since switched to the “million active devices” metric, best I can tell, and has only reported numbers for Windows 10.
We know the PC industry peaked around four years ago – Asymco’s Horace Dediu tweeted a graph this morning illustrating the decline. He claims that “The PC market (excluding Mac) has been in decline for 18 quarters in a row.” Has the Windows user base shrunk in concert? Or did Myerson’s tongue slip?
Something else about the Windows 10 Event has been gnawing at me. Myerson talked about “400 million people that are using Windows 10.” (See the official webcast, around 7:00.) That happens to be the same number of monthly active devices Microsoft reported a month ago.
Gregg Keizer at Computerworld has been keeping close track of the official and semi-official utterances. Last month, Keizer said that “the Windows 10 adoption pace had slowed.” If Myerson’s number is correct – again, no slip of the tongue, and equating “users” with “active devices” – it sounds to me like the adoption pace has positively frozen.
New numbers? Or little mistakes?
UPDATE: Eagle-eyed @teroalhonen pointed me to a Feb 2015 PDF from Microsoft, titled “Microsoft by the Numbers” that says
One and a half billion people use Windows every day. (Source: Microsoft)
Microsoft has a “by the numbers” web site that doesn’t include any mention of the number of Windows users.