Windows 10 Reaches 300M Active Devices - Does it Matter ?

Today - Microsoft announced that Windows 10 has reached the 300M active devices milestone.

 Back in April 2015 at the Build Conference MS announced that it expected to have 1B active Windows 10 devices in 2 - 3 years.   So here we are at effectively 9 months and 300M.  So figure 33.5M devices / month on average. 

 At that pace - there should be nearly 400M by the anniversary date on July 29 and so by the 2.5 year mark - assuming a steady pace - MS will reach that 1B goal.  So the pace of upgrades are good and in fact better than Windows 7 or 8.

 But as I've stated in other posts - in the same time period that MS is expecting to get to 1B, some 3.5B mobile devices will be sold - with some 85% of them being Android based which works out to 2.975B so nearly a 3:1 ratio.

 While there are a lot of critics of Windows 10 (often including myself) - overall I do think that based on performance, features and capabilities - it is the best Windows OS.  I recently received a new corp laptop with Windows 8.1 and couldn't get to Windows 10 fast enough.  And Windows 7 is just antique to me.

 With that said, the numbers I posted above make it clear that Android is the new Windows.  Sure MS will continue to dominate the PC market - in the most recent market share numbers Windows is at 89% with Apple's OSX a very distant second, just touching the 10% number.  Linux is around 1%.

 But as we all know - PC sales are shrinking.  Some 9.6% in Q1 2016 according to Gartner.  So while MS is absolutely dominate - it's in a shrinking market. I expect Smartphone sales in 2016 to exceed 1.5B - so around 6.25 times the size of the PC market. 

 As I mentioned in an earlier post - in 2015 Samsung alone sold more smartphones than the entire PC industry.  Combine that with the fact that Windows Phone is effectively a non factor in the smartphone market and the landscape on who is now influences the market has changed.

 So while the good news is that Windows is continuing it's march towards 1B devices sometime in early 2018, the bad news is that is will be dwarfed by Android sales and that is where the developer communities and revenue are going.








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