Today Microsoft announced that Windows 10 was now installed on 300 million devices. That’s an astonishing feat given that the new operating system came out less than a year ago. However, the company has bigger plans. They want to reach 1 billion users soon and according to these figures, they’re on track to do that by summer 2018. We compiled a chart to demonstrate Windows 10’s growth since it first launched.
On the left you can see that the graph goes up to 300, in this case it represents the 300 million users at the moment. At the bottom is the month where August 2015 represents “month 0” and May 2016 represents “month 10”. If you calculate the slope of the graph, you can plug it into your standard “y=mx+b” equation to calculate that Windows 10 will reach 1 billion users by July 2018.
The PC market always fluctuates so it might take longer than that but considering that there is a Surface Phone rumored to come out soon along with an updated Xbox One, this seems like a reasonable analysis. Additionally, Surface tablets are selling really well and their sales are going up every quarter. We would expect them to keep on increasing as the months go by and new models are unveiled. Additionally, PC gaming also seems to have seen a revival recently and that should contribute to some Windows 10 sales to the presence of DirectX 12.
All in all, Windows 10 will definitely be Microsoft’s most popular operating system ever. Microsoft also seems to want to keep on updating Windows 10 to different versions rather than releasing a Windows 11, similar to what Apple does with Mac OS X. This is a great strategy because they can refine Windows 10 considerably and make it the best it can be. It also increases the install base considerably, attracting more developers for apps and games.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.