Windows 10 Won't Hit 1B Devices By Mid-2018

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It turns out that everyone that called BS on Microsoft's prediction that Windows 10 would be installed on a billion devices by 2018 were right. The company has admitted that it most likely will not hit the billion mark by mid-2018, placing some of the blame on its phone hardware business.

"Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350M monthly active devices, with record customer satisfaction and engagement. We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices. In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices - and increasing customer delight with Windows."
 
They really thought phones would contribute in a significant way to Win10 adoption? Have they not been paying attention to the entire history of smartphones? No one wants Windows Phones. I don't even think they are particularly bad but that is the reality.

Either way hundreds of millions of installs is hardly a "failure", and pretty much every new pre-built PC people buy will have Win10 now.
 
windows phone is actually a great interface, but the problem is that there just aren't many apps for the platform.

then again, imo the greatest interface of all is still webos (mattias duarte's masterpiece: cards, stacking, universal search, etc), so my tastes may be questionable :p

it's weird that lg bought the rights to webos and then rejiggered it for tvs instead of applying its design principles to make a new interface for android. if lg did that, i would hardly give samsung another look.

i really miss my old pre plus :/
 
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Maybe this will be the excuse for extending the free Windows 10 upgrade?

Most the older systems that I've done a fresh install of 10 on, run noticeably faster that they did under Windows 7.
 
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This is the best spin city money can buy. Wouldn't it be great if companies actually had to tell the truth? 'We will fail our initial goal of one billion devices by mid-2018 due to suckage phone sales and our craptastic handling of trying to force Windows 10 on the masses.'
 
nutzo said:
Maybe this will be the excuse for extending the free Windows 10 upgrade?

Most the older systems that I've done a fresh install of 10 on, run noticeably faster that they did under Windows 7.
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Yup, walked a buddy through his last month, and he freed up 40GBof disk space over his ancient Win7 install :D

I knew they were smoking crack when they announced 1b devices, just because it was "free." There aren't even a billion people on this planet who know WHAT AN OPERATING SYSTEM IS, let alone feel confident enough to push the upgrade button (my buddy fails horribly in this category).

And then there's the huge swath of people who have hardware or software incompatibilities and won't budge.

Outside Steam games, the uptake has been faster than previous upgrades, but still relatively slow.
 
They have basically dropped their phone business. It was never going to go anywhere. Windows Phone is a great device. But, it's just not moving forward; weak hardware, WP10 OS is buggy as shit (looks beautiful, though!), lack of carrier support (I was going to upgrade to the latest and greatest with Verizon, but the newest phone they had was the same one I got 3 years ago). Microsoft has just really screwed the pooch with their Windows Phone division. It had a lot of potential, I really like the interface and the OS. They just didn't give it much attention and put it on the back burner and it really shows.

Even if they did have a great phone OS, it wouldn't have gotten close to a billion devices. Win10 is excellent and I love it. Xbox One is excellent (they are counting that as a Win10 core, right?). They were just way over confident in their OS push. Especially with businesses.

Great products, bad marketing (free upgrade, just push the Red X to begin!), bad support (Windows Phone OS...). Even with a perfect launch, I doubt they'd hit that 1B mark.
 
Wait, are you sure the author didn't forget to count the 100-200 million Windows 10 smartphones that are going to take off any day now, certainly? :D
 
pxc said:
Wait, are you sure the author didn't forget to count the 100-200 million Windows 10 smartphones that are going to take off any day now, certainly? :D
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I went to an iPhone, so they lost one. I know several other Microsoft fans that are leaving the platform, too. If they can't even keep the die hard Microsoft fans, then they are doing something wrong.
 
nutzo said:
Most the older systems that I've done a fresh install of 10 on, run noticeably faster that they did under Windows 7.
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A freshly installed OS always runs faster than an old one. Until it gets bloated by crap that programs leave behind, even if you uninstall them. Had you installed a fresh Windows Vista it'd still have felt faster initially.
 
M76 said:
A freshly installed OS always runs faster than an old one. Until it gets bloated by crap that programs leave behind, even if you uninstall them. Had you installed a fresh Windows Vista it'd still have felt faster initially.
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Well, yes, there is certainly some of this at play, but Windows 10 does appear to be better optimized to make more out of the same hardware, even when you compare two freshly installed operating systems.
 
M76 said:
A freshly installed OS always runs faster than an old one. Until it gets bloated by crap that programs leave behind, even if you uninstall them. Had you installed a fresh Windows Vista it'd still have felt faster initially.
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The point was that a fresh install of 10 feels faster than a fresh install of 7
 
I'm guessing that were looking at something like a 75/25 or 80/20 split between PCs and everything else, phones, Xboxes, HoloLens but yeah Windows phones are losing share fast. They should hit 750 to 800 millions PCs by 2018.
 
Ur_Mom said:
I went to an iPhone, so they lost one. I know several other Microsoft fans that are leaving the platform, too. If they can't even keep the die hard Microsoft fans, then they are doing something wrong.
Click to expand...

They just aren't releasing killer phones. I've been pretty happy with my Lumia 950. They really need a Surface Phone but that's not coming probably until next year. And I'm not saying that a Surface Phone will save Windows Phones but it would probably help.
 
They really needed to have a bigger push on Windows Phone devices. I don't even think they're WITH the other cell phones at most big box stores. Instead they're over by the PCs where nobody who is looking at phones is likely to even see them. They should have handed them out to pretty much every full-time mobile rep at a big-box store so there would be some excitement and a reason to push something other than iPhones and Android devices.

WP10 is REALLY nice, but it hardly matters if nobody ever even sees it.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, yes, there is certainly some of this at play, but Windows 10 does appear to be better optimized to make more out of the same hardware, even when you compare two freshly installed operating systems.
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Windows 8.1 already had all those under the hood improvements. and runned faster than 7
 
heatlesssun said:
They just aren't releasing killer phones. I've been pretty happy with my Lumia 950. They really need a Surface Phone but that's not coming probably until next year. And I'm not saying that a Surface Phone will save Windows Phones but it would probably help.
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If they released a Surface Phone, I would have bought it. I was very happy with my Lumia 928. I wanted the 1050 (? the new AT&T one), but couldn't switch carriers. Great phones. Just nothing considered flagship. Tons of cheap ones, very few good ones and extremely rare flagship. They had the Lumia Icon, but it was quickly discontinued. It was only out for 4-6 months...
 
nutzo said:
The point was that a fresh install of 10 feels faster than a fresh install of 7
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You didn't say you did a fresh install of 7 before you did a fresh install of 10.
 
nutzo said:
The point was that a fresh install of 10 feels faster than a fresh install of 7
Click to expand...

I've not run 7 on anything but my work machine for a long time now. The devices I have with NVMe drives certainly feel much zipper than anything I was running 7 on but that's obviously got a lot to do with the hardware.
 
"with record customer satisfaction"

Going by all the gnashing of teeth I see everywhere on the Internet I have to call bullshit on this claim.

""Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350M monthly active devices"

Don't be disingenuous Microsoft, the only reason they got that many people to install it is because it was free and using overly aggressive tactics.
 
Every time I look at my phone I think it is a PDA. It is my contacts, my ebooks, my cell phone, and on the go music player. If they want something to get people drooling over a new phone OS, they need to make a sketch pad that works like paper. They have the tech they could use wacom tech to make a phone that uses a wireless signal to tell were the pen tip is and it could even be a tip that works like a ring or pen cap. They could use their surface tech. It is windows there are lots of options, if they stay stuck in the mindset they have to build everything people are going to shrug and pick up an android phone or an apple phone. Windows ten is good start but they really do not take advantage to most of the tech that runs on windows. You have wacom making cintiqu. Monoprice was looking into simalar tech for a while. My monitor was over two thousand dollars when I bought it because I wanted the very high picutre quality and a screen that looked as close to the color reproduction as a crt. Ya I know almost impossible. The thing is any number of companies could have licensing the tech with different panels, but did not. Not enough money in it. Windows sat for years not moving to windows 64 until people realized that if the memory was 64 bit only they could get their games to look more impressive now everyone is trying to figure it out. Microsoft needs to do what they did with commerical versions. Make more than one OS to different things. Make an OS that supports processors that don't exist so that when someone figures it out they simply adapt the code to work with the tech.
 
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