Windows 10 Now Runs On 600 Million ‘Active’ Machines

Microsoft’s flagship OS is now running on more than half a billion devices that have been ‘active’ (connected to the internet at some point) in the last 28 days.

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, apparently broke the news by commenting on the 600m figure during this week’s annual shareholders meeting, according to the GeekWire website. Officially, Microsoft have not commented, but neither has the company denied the news. 

Rather than using the number of machines that have had Windows 10 installed them at some point since the OS was released, Microsoft instead are measuring the success of Windows 10 by the number of people who actually use it; specifically the number of people who have been ‘active.’ Hence, Sadella’s, claim that 600,000,000 people used Windows 10 last month.

Devices included in that magic 600m number includes PCs, Notebooks, tablets, Xbox Ones,, HoloLens headsets, Surfaces, and even the less than 2% share Microsoft’s now binned smartphone project.

Not all of the Windows 10 family members are still with us, but uptake of the OS is still impressive.

Great news for Microsoft?

Of course it is, but the figure is still some 400 million Windows 10 running machines short from where Microsoft had hoped to be at the end of 2017. While it is perhaps inevitable that Windows 10 will at some point have the fabled one billion users it had hoped to hit by now, adoption of Windows 10 has slowed dramatically since Microsoft withdrew its free ‘upgrade to Windows 10’ offer last year.

Losing the battle but probably winning the war

Microsoft itself did concede last year that reaching 1 billion was no longer a viable prospect in the short to mid term. On one hand, Microsoft had hoped that its Windows 10 for mobile would gain more market share than it had, while on the other, there are still millions of people happily running the still excellent Windows 7. And as the tech giant is set to continue supporting version 7 of Windows, it doesn’t look there will be any further surge for Windows 10 anytime soon, with most people only now using Windows 10 when they buy a new machine that already has Windows 10 preinstalled.