Read more: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microso...illion-or-bustFor Windows 10, Microsoft is aiming for a 10-digit installed base.
That's a 1 followed by 9 zeroes: 1,000,000,000. One billion devices running Windows 10.
At the Build developers' conference in San Francisco earlier this month, Microsoft's Terry Myerson declared that the company's goal was to reach the billion-device milestone "within two to three years after launch."
Now a billion might not be what it used to be, but it's still a big number. How realistic is it?
If you do the math, it's not hard to get to that number and even beyond.
That math is, unfortunately, fuzzy, because we don't really know how many PCs and tablets and phones are out there to a fine level of precision, nor what the owners of those devices have done with them since they were purchased.
But there are enough reliable sales figures out there, some in official reports from companies, others supplied by trustworthy market research firms, to make some educated guesses. Even with wide-ranging assumptions and allowing very broad margins of error, there are plausible paths to a billion.
With those caveats, let's survey the Windows 10 landscape as it might look in 2018.
In two to 3 years they'll be nearing their goal in new PC sales alone, not to speak of PCs that will upgrade to Win 10. This should be easy for MS. It seems to me that the goal of a billion users, rather than devices, would be more of a logical goal for MS; or at least one that won't be so easily reached.
When you add in all the counterfeit Windows 7 upgrading to Windows 10 from China alone should make a Billion a easy target.
It would be a great goal to reach if it was a Billion paying customers.
Didn't they just clarify that whole "counterfeit/hacked" versions of Windows 7 get a free upgrade thing as being a misunderstanding? I thought I read that somewhere.
I wish they would also extend the offer to people on capable machines that still run XP or Vista. They want people off XP as much as possible and Vista will be next to go (even thought the user share isn't that high anyway), and many of the systems that are still running those two (mostly Core 2 at this point I think) are capable of running Windows 8, so Win 10 shouldn't be a problem at all for them. Plus it will add to their target of 1 billion.
They are counting PC's, Smart Phones, Tablet's, Surface Things, and Laptops. Many people own at least 3 of those devices so 1 Billion is really not that unreachable sine they are counting devices and not users.
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