What’s One Billion Between Friends? (Premium)

At its Build 2022 conference last week, Microsoft touted the success of Windows 11, but some of the claims deserve more scrutiny. Key among, Microsoft seemed to imply that there are now one billion Windows 11 users.

There are not.

“From enhancing Windows’ speed and reliability to optimizing the performance of its flagship applications to improving Window’s sustainability, we have been working diligently to deliver faster, more reliable, and more efficient computing experiences that our users love,” a Microsoft post titled Delivering Delightful Performance for More Than One Billion Users Worldwide reads. It then goes on to list six highlights from the past year, four of which are specific to Windows 11, with Edge and Teams accounting for the other two.

The post then explains that “Windows operates at a massive scale – with over one billion users.” Windows 10 is never mentioned in this post, not once. But Windows 11 is called out explicitly 7 times, while numerous other references to Windows or Windows features are Windows 11-specific. So it is perhaps not surprising that multiple people have contacted me to ask about this claim. Does Windows 11 have one billion users?

No, Windows—which I take to mean supported versions of Windows, meaning Windows 10 and Windows 11—now serve over one billion users.

One billion is a lot of users. But a bit over one year ago, Microsoft claimed that there were over 1.4 billion PCs running Windows 10 and 11. Did the Windows user base shrink? Is that why Microsoft has been touting vague Windows engagement numbers since the pandemic?

I don’t know. Sure, PC sales have fallen since the artificial highs of the pandemic, but the user base? That 1.4 billion figure represented “monthly active devices,” which I at the time noted roughly translates to the “actual number of PCs out in the world.” Surely, some big percentage of users have multiple PCs. But 400 million of them? Hm.

It’s also worth pointing out that Microsoft, in 2018, claimed that there were “1.5 billion Windows-powered PCs used around the world.” (And that same figure was used in 2015, too.) Granted, that was during the math-averse Terry Myerson years, and at a time when anything remotely related to Windows—like phones, Xboxes, and HoloLens—was being counted. Plus, older versions of Windows, like Windows 7, were still supported at that time, and any PCs still running these systems today are no longer being counted.

Still. It’s hard to wonder whether the user base isn’t shrinking.

Again, I don’t know about that. But users are users. And since Microsoft did use that word, we can at least map that onto the latest usage stats and see where things land. (After all, usage stats don’t differentiate between the number of devices, they just show how often something was used.) And according to StatCounter, Windows 10 accounts for 71.36 percent of all Windows-based PCs online, while Windows 11 accounts for just 23.11 percent. The remaining 5.5 percent or so are split between Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows XP, and others.

Removing them from the math, 32.4 percent of Windows 10 and 11 PCs are running Windows 11, or almost exactly one-third of the total. So there are roughly 324 million Windows 11 users and roughly 675 million Windows 10 users. (That happens to be roughly the same number of Windows 10 users there were in April 2018, for whatever that’s worth.)

Many may wish to blame quality for the relatively slow uptick of Windows 11, but I think the bigger issue is the artificial hardware requirements that ensure that many people don’t just upgrade. (In addition to whatever percentage of businesses that likewise do not allow the upgrade, even when it is available.) I suspect this to be the case because Windows 11 is technically just another Windows 10 Feature Update and were it not for the artificial hardware blocker, more of the user base would have just been upgraded by now.

One also wonders about the infamous Terry Myerson prediction from 2015, when he stated that Windows 10 would have over one billion users “within two or three years.” It took Microsoft almost double that amount of time to hit the one billion milestone, but here we are, almost exactly three years later, and the total Windows 10/11 user base is unchanged, at one billion. (And to be clear, in 2020, the claim was that “over one billion people have chosen Windows 10,” so that measurement, at least—users—is the same and directly comparable.)

Could some of these numbers be wrong? Sure. But let’s check.

If Windows 10 and 11 together are one billion users and Windows overall is thus roughly 1.055 billion users, then the Mac, with 7.9 percent usage share overall, represents about 284 million users. (7.9 is 28.4 percent of 27.83, which is the total share of Windows; 28.4 percent of 1 billion is 284 million.) Are there 284 million Mac users worldwide? I don’t know. But that seems high. (You can do similar math for Android and iOS, too, but I’ll stick with the desktop here.)

Maybe we don’t need to square this with other data. Maybe it’s enough that Microsoft has explicitly stated that there are “over one billion Windows users worldwide.” The post that triggered this navel-gazing uses some variation of that phrase three times, including the headline. It’s pretty explicit.

So “over one billion” it is. Still.