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.
Most excellent news!
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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.
And that CEO completely turned the company around. Microsoft was circling the drain before they changed strategies.
You say turned around, I say ruined. He’s just remaking it into another IBM by selling services and killing anything innovative or creative.
You’re allowed to be wrong. The fact is if they continued doing what they were doing they would be almost entirely irrelevant today.
And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
they already have an their AI division earns way more than the Windows division. Matters little to them about Windows numbers dropping because in reality PCs as we know it are declining far more rapidly that anyone wants to say
You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It’s almost like there’s a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame …
But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?
There’s no “learning” anymore, there’s riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you’re not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.
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.
they do OK but services side including AI make way more…
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!
Microsoft could become a cloud computing platform, and the machine itself would act as a Terminal.
This often sucks when the server and terminal are onsite. Put the server elsewhere and only those with best connections will like it. Latency is a bitch.
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.
Well a bunch of them are using WSL to do their work, which isn’t the same, but shows how many people are just stuck with a Windows box.
In StackOverflow 2024 survey ~17% of both professional and personal use users were using WSL.
Source: StackOverflow 2024 Survey
Edit - A word went missing due to my battle with autocorrect. 😩
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
I think at least one M365 plan includes a windows license now.
Yes, I don’t like Windows one bit anymore but back then, Windows Mobile was very solid! I loved my Lumia phones.
If Windows becomes a sub service for business only, three things three things can happen:
1 Mac’s become the most sold consumer product
2 Linux takes off like never before
3 Some consumer version where ads accompany every mouse click
I hope it’s gonna be number two
Unless there’s a miracle, it would be:
4 consumer are relegated to DRM’d-to-Hell-and-back smartphones
im glad they are losing users then.
if not being their cash cow gotta mean we get treated like this, then they should not have the market cornered.
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 makes sense. I have a friend from way back in HS who interned there while he was working on his degree who said that cloud services was the priority at the time, and Windows was more just a vehicle that they continued to maintain. That continues to be the approximate temperature of the product and is in line with my expectations.
For some reason modern business degree holders don’t even consider the possibility of increasing head coubts but instead maximising gains from remaining heads.
Same with employees, they see things like dirty stores and long lines and they try to force employees to work as sanitation crews and implement time limits to make lines faster long before they ever hire somebody new.
They don’t care they have Azure now.
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.
Chromebooks went from “What is that?” To literally everywhere in schools.
Android phones are everywhere.
Google and the Chrome browser really ate into Microsoft’s dominance.
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
For most people, a tablet is a direct replacement for a laptop anyway, especially with a wireless keyboard. I run software for work that, as far as I know, is Windows only, but most people will be fine with a tablet, or even just a phone.
A tablet is not a replacement for a laptop, its just a secondary “big phone” for watching videos because its more confortable for the eyes.
And sending emails, social media, video calls, taking notes, pretty sure they can even run things like power point presentations now.
And Apple, with people replacing traditional computers with Android and iOS devices.
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!
Sad thing is I guarantee they’d keep a majority market share after doing this. Few people would even be aware, and fewer still actually give a shit about their privacy. As for ads on the desktop, that might push people away… but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
And you wanna know the full hypocrisy? Google Chrome also comes with an Ad blocker, on by default. They block ads they don’t deem good, but allow all ads from AdSense, of course.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
My friend did have an adblock, but it was the one built into Brave (iirc) by default. I noticed they knew it was there and active, but didn’t really think twice about any of the sites it didn’t block ads on. I assume they just didn’t know it was possible to block certain ads, never really crossing their mind that some adblockers are better than others. No, if theirs can’t do it, no adblock can.
I also think years and years of unskippable commercials on cable TV, and now even streaming services, has made people kinda numb to it.
This is the terrifying part. Ads have become so normal in everyday life that people see nothing wrong with wasting their life away being marketed to by corporations. How much of someone’s life is wasted hearing their existence isn’t good enough but if they’d only buy some product they could be happy?
The Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror was supposed to be a warming.
But instead it seems corporations used it as a guide, and people just accepted having ads bombarded into their skulls in exchange for content, instead of getting enraged by it.
friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.
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
You mother fucker… You’re hired!
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.
I think thats exactly it. A lot of the people begrudgingly have a PC. I bet most of those just use whatever the PC came with. Linux and Mac users are more likely to enjoy using a PC.
I could quite literally just get by on my phone these days. I only use the laptop for the larger screen and something to hold an extremely large capacity SD card, as for whatever reason samsung flip phones don’t have that anymore.
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.
Average people are also more likely to ditch their PCs than Linux users.
See the recent meme:
I just installed Mint and some games on 5 Thinkpad T420s my boss was going to throw out. Sunday’s LAN party was pretty fun.
Is this my future?
If you’re lucky
MAC sales peaked 10-11 years ago.
I just got a cheap minipc to tinker with and it had windows 11. Not bad and unexpected.
First thing I did was wipe and install Ubuntu of course because that’s what I wanted.
I do like Mini PCs, but I kind of wish there was an easy way to get a solid GPU into it. There’s those weird docks but they’re far from standard, and it would be nice if the GPU had a similar form factor, so you could just stack them up like a MiniPC on top of it like an old hi-fi separates system.
Slap a storage box on it as well for some HDDs, baby you got a server going.
Your best bet is to shoot for one with an AMD Ryzen chip, as they have by-far the best iGPU available.
Getting a dedicated GPU into a mini PC is a pretty big ask, but the above will even do moderate gaming tasks. My laptop with a Ryzen iGPU plays Guild Wars 2 just fine, for example.
A self-built Mini-ITX box might also be up your alley, as those can take proper PCI-E graphics cards.
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Will not happen. Privacy conscious people who have evaded Microsoft don’t use Steam. Being closed source software, they collect huge amounts of data.
Sure it will, there are a ton of people who want to get away from the trash that is Microsoft and play Steam games, myself included.
In your case Nobara is the perfect distro. It comes with steam preinstalled and has a lot of gaming tweaks. I used it as a daily driver a year ago, but it wasn’t something for me.
Bazzite as well, which uses the Atomic backing, so it is more easily recoverable in case of an oops.
No worries here. I’ve been on EndeavourOS for 3+ months now. Im just saying there’s enough crossover that I think the steam hardware survey will show the uptick over time.
Tbh, I’ve wanted to cut over to Linux for years, but I hadn’t due to game support. We’re at a point now with Proton that there’s almost no reason not to, unless you’re that beholden to games that install
rootkits, er, kernel level anticheat, in which case just dual boot.
question: if i’m using steam in linux under wine, it counts as windows or linux?
Wine is a translation layer, not an emulator so you’ll likely appear in the Linux users list.
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I’m thinking they’re doing it on purpose. Think you’re a multibazillion company, want to quit your least profitable line of work (OS business) but it’s also your most famous front. Diluting a business is how you quit without scaring investors.
Where are they going? There’s no way it’s Linux, right? So I guess it’s Mac?
It’s kind of linux. Also kind of mac. They’re going to android and ios.
Phones and tablets. The younger generations are only using those for the most part.
Would say that the businesses are still propping up Windows hard whilst the personal space is pretty much dying. I mean, most of the younger generation are using tablets or phones more than a PC these days. I would argue that unless you’re in need of that power, those tablets or phones could do everything they need like drawing, gaming or streaming.
If businesses gave Microsoft the flick, it would devastate their bottom line a lot.
windows dying doesn’t help. they are on a shopping spree buying every AAA game that tencent haven’t already bought.
Yay, monopolies
Let’s wait 'til the shopping spree is over and break them the fuck up <3
Prevention is always better than a cure
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.
Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR
Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is… I don’t really believe it, but really cool if true.
Three points four percentage points. Not great. Not terrible.
It sounds much better when you say 1 in 167 people then vs 1 in 25 people today.
It was unthinkable 10 years ago. I call it a win.
It can also be noted that the trend over time for the “unknown” category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the “unknown” category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.
So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
Android is not on this plot, it’s desktop only.
The 2nd place is interestingly not Apple, but Unknown.
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
Strap a minisfourm pc and battery pack to your back, run a usb cable up to your AR glasses. Strap a Svalboard to each hand and run the cables up your arms. Easy problem solved.
But if you say something like People should have basic IT knowledge you get called an elitist.
And yet people are fine with:
People should have basic cooking knowledge
People should have basic financial knowledge
I began using Windows in 1992. I switched to MacOS this year and I’m never going back.
As someone who has had to use Windows, OSX and Linux as a daily driver at different points, OSX was by far the most challenging to work with. Every few months something broke. Fully on Linux now.
Finally! Someone said it! My company changed my work laptop to a Mac. It’s been a couple of months, and I still haven’t got used to the desktop environment. Navigating between open windows with regular mouse/keyboard is a pain.
I find window grouping very annoying (this is also true for Gnome). What makes it even worse, is that the tilde is next to the left shift, instead of being above Tab. I think that’s because we have British keyboard.
I never got used to it. Always felt gimped using it. At least with Windows I had shortcuts and virtual desktops.
As someone who has used Windows, OSX, and Linux as a daily driver at different points, Windows was by far the most challenging to work with. Every week there was some problem.
In recent years, my company provided Dell with 32GB of memory running Windows would blue screen practically weekly. Most of the time it struggled to run more than one instance of an IDE. Windows finally crashed to the point that the only option was restore the OS.
I requested a different machine and have been running macOS with less memory. Have actually been able to run more IDE instances than the Windows machine would run. No crashes.
Completely Unix based OSes now. Linux servers. Linux desktops. Mac laptops.
Your windows problems weren’t brand new problems and likely from there systems or integrations.
When I say there were issues with OSX, I mean brand new problems stemming from updates breaking compatibility with systems and software. Nothing like getting to work one morning and every single employee lost the ability to screen share, or suddenly the file system for your virtual machines was broken, etc.
What a well earned drop. They keep forcing their bullshit on us, of course we’re interested in other OS’s as a result.
I do use windows for most things, but my servers will never run anything but Linux at this point.
Funny thing. Back in the day, and possibly today, all windows Hotmail/Livemail servers were Linux.
Hotmail ran on FreeBSD when Microsoft acquired the company in 1997. They started the transition a few years later and it was entirely hosted on Windows by 2005.
Requiring 50x the hardware no doubt
