It didn't make it on schedule, but Microsoft can finally say it managed to reach and exceed the 1 billion monthly Windows 10 device milestone. The company set this goal in 2015, with the intention of reaching it towards the end of summer 2018.
The then head of the operating systems division of the house of Redmond, Terry Myerson, painted much faster growth for an operating system that at the time could also count on a smartphone variant, Windows 10 Mobile, which then gradually disappeared.
To this we must add the reluctance of many companies to abandon Windows 7, despite the change to Windows 10 was free in the first year. It was therefore essentially necessary to end the support extended to Windows 7, which ended on January 14, to achieve the ambitious initial goal.
"Today we are excited to announce that over 1 billion people have chosen Windows 10 in 200 countries to bring us to over 1 billion active Windows 10 devices," Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice president of Modern Life, Search and Devices wrote in a post. Windows 10 runs not only on all "PC" devices, but also on Xbox One, Surface Hub, mixed reality devices, HoloLens and is also available in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment.
In the post, Microsoft says it now has 17.8 million registered Windows Insider testers, although in reality only a fraction regularly participates in the feature update test phase. The operating system also runs on over 80,000 different configurations between laptops and 2 in 1 and is preparing to embrace the future with evolutions such as Windows 10X for incoming two-screen devices.
After having largely crossed the first milestone, this time the company did not set new goals, but you can be sure that if it reached 2 billion, it would not be long to let us know.