Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
You mother fucker… You’re hired.
Yeah, that wouldn’t really do anything, google just announced it for gemini and I don’t really see a push back against it, meta wants to compromise the copy right of all creators on its platform and it too was allowed, sadly right now in the name of AI advancement every kind of privacy will be compromised
If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans…
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it’s M$… 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.
It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
I could imagine a future where Microsoft is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.
Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!
MS did a shift like that already. The shift from MS-DOS to NT was transparent to the vast majority of people to the point that most people didn’t realize they were two different OSes.
I don’t see why they couldn’t do it again. NTVDM was similar in concept to what wine does. Imagine if MS actively contributed to wine, or a wine like project.
i was a MS employee once. Windows hasn’t been their focus since Windows XP. Once they discovered the profit margins of Office 98… Windows was just a way to keep you using Office
This aligns with statcounter data here: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202505
Windows market share on desktop has been slowly but steadily declining. From 95+% in 2009, to almost 70% today. In the same time period Linux went up from 0.6% to 4%, which is not bad.
So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
Kids mostly use mobile devices and don’t even know what a folder is, so both.
Yea, people don’t even have computers now. Its happy tap the phone and love the Google, return to monke. We are the .00000001 percent.
And that’s honestly why this story isn’t the good news it appears to be. An entire generation growing up used to (or rather, used by) locked-down devices designed for consumption is a goddamned disaster!
Can’t use a computer when you’re tired and wanna lay in bed, or just browse memes on transit to work, or have a GPS in your pocket, or a camera in your pocket, or a portable communication device… etc
Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is… I don’t really believe it, but really cool if true.
Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR
Everyone talking about how it’s because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they’re ignoring the big one:
People don’t need as many computers these days. You don’t have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.
It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that’s winning here.
These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
We’re in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We’d have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to “upgrade” itself during the night without him agreeing to it.
Wish you success in the migration
How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?
Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.
On the server side I can agree, but linux does not get device drivers for majority of hardware let alone regular device driver updates. That fact alone makes the entire company un-compliant in many industries.
You could get an entire fleet of linux supported laptops and get then compliance becomes easier to manage since the software on linux lends well to sys admin fleet control. You would have to push patches weekly to the fleet which would result in a ton of random user bugs.
does not get device drivers for majority of hardware
Literally lying
Please go on any distro fourm to the support section and tell me how many threads have hardware related issues. Majority of these are due to non-existent/unsupported drivers.
One guy hacking together a device driver to upstream is not the same as the manufacturer supporting it with regular updates. Windows gets driver updates seemingly every week and linux is lucky to get a 2nd update or even a first.
support section
If I was reading your fan club forum I would see loads of positive comments about you.
You have no data to support your claim.
This is such a stupid argument I cant believe you’re even trying to make the case. I’ll pick a common enterprise device the HP zbook firefly. NXP NFC NPC300 Proximity Driver - Its had 5 OEM driver updates in the past 4 years on windows. Meanwhile the NXP linux_libnfc-nci repo which is NXP’s OEM repo is wildly out of date and looks borderline dead. I checked the kernel tree and there are “common” patches under drivers/nfc/nxp-nci that include support for the NPC300 but these dont match up with the patches that are released for windows and dont seem to be specific fixes to address CVE issues.
Lets go less specific and take a look at fwupd for the zbook https://fwupd.org/lvfs/hsireports/device?host_vendor=HP&host_family=103C_5336AN+HP+ZBook&host_product=HP+ZBook+Firefly+14+G7+Mobile+Workstation
Here we can see the tests that fwupd has done to verify the device firmware. As you can see its missing a lot of functionality. This is a linux supported device apparently. If its missing this much I can only imagine how bad other devices are. Keep in mind this is only checking the working functionality and is not checking to see if the patches are up to date to protect against the latest CVEs. On windows HP has released 22 patches in the last 5 years with the latest patch containing fixes for 12 CVEs. Meanwhile on linux im not sure if HP has even released a single complete patch for this device let alone constant updates to fix the CVEs.
I’m currently working on getting our device fleet in order for EU Gov contract compliance and a fleet of these devices would instantly disqualify us. I love linux but we have work to do and being ignorant to the issues doesnt help anything.
My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore.People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202505
Both Linux and MacOS look fairly flat overall, with a few spikes for Mac. What did happen was iOS and especially Android went to the moon.
Most people had a PC for a bit of light office work, emails and storing pictures. All of that can be done on a phone and more besides. It’s not great that a handful of Silicon Valley techbros are holding everyone’s data to ransom, but that’s what the masses are doing.
They don’t care they have Azure now.
I wonder if there’s any correlation with AI killing the office job market.
I wonder how many millions of computers are going to end up getting thrown away because they don’t meet the ridiculous requirements for windows 11.
I just recently built a computer, though truth be told it’s basically my wife’s old computer stuffed into a new case, we’ve been holding onto her old components as she’s done upgrades. So it’s basically a roughly 10 year old computer, it has one of the last AMD processors from before the ryzen era, but it was a beefy computer when she built it and it’s still managing to run most of what’s out there on acceptable (for me, I’m not exactly a graphics snob) settings.
Of course it’s not gonna be compatible with windows 11, so I’ve been figuring out what my next move is going to be. Most likely I’ll bite the bullet and build basically a whole new PC and recycle this one into a home server or something, it’s definitely still got a lot of life left in it, but I’d be lying if the idea of just going over to Linux isn’t really tempting
As much as I want to joke that it is the year of the Linux desktop, I think it is mostly because the younger you are the less likely you are to have a pc (so Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD for the dozens of you).
As far as I can see most of the time people use their phone for everything and only touch a pc for work or if they have a hobby that requires the use of a pc (gaming, digital art, music, programming, etc…).
It’s almost like if you piss off your users then they’ll ditch you.
good. fuck. microsoft.
they had the choice of not being fucking awful and they had no reason to. im glad its crumbling for them even if wayyy too late.
It’s Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
Just want to say, Google Docs is NOT free. Just because you don’t send them money doesn’t mean you aren’t paying.
