Numbers Don’t Lie, People Do (Premium)

In April 2015, three months ahead of the Windows 10 launch, Windows head Terry Myerson made a bold prediction: Windows 10, specifically designed to fix the problems triggered by Windows 8 and reverse Microsoft’s sinking PC fortunes, would be installed on one billion devices within “two to three years.”

As I wrote in Programming Windows: One Billion (Premium), this was an audacious goal, but it was also next to impossible because it required Microsoft to somehow give away or sell more Windows 10 licenses in that time frame than had sold during its Windows 7 heyday. But that claim was problematic for a more important reason. It would expose the difference between the non-confirmable soft statements that Microsoft executives typically utter and give the world a metric by which to judge the success of both Windows 10 and Myerson himself.

The history of what happened next is well understood. Despite giving away free Windows 10 upgrades to the entire Windows 7 and 8 installed bases (and to Windows Phone 7 users), Microsoft quickly realized that it would never hit this milestone. And so in July 2016, one year after Windows 10 launched, Microsoft quietly revealed, via an ethically challenged blogger, that it would not have one billion active Windows 10 devices by mid-2018. Instead, it took Microsoft almost 5 years to reach Myerson’s one billion goal.

Of course, by that time, Myerson was gone, and we had since learned that the one billion milestone was tied to his compensation and that he had fudged the Windows 10 adoption numbers by counting virtual machine (VMs) installs. He had been given an impossible task, had announced the milestone to the world, and had cheated to make it work. And he had come up short.

After a nearly two-year leadership gap, Myerson was finally succeeded by Panos Panay, who was placed on Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT), as Myerson had been, a bit over a year later. But Panay and Myerson couldn’t have been more different: Where Myerson was plain-spoken and technical, Panay spoke in marketing nonsense-speak and had driven Microsoft’s Surface business into the ground with his bad decisions and lack of leadership. But Panay learned one thing Myerson had not: He was never specific about Windows adoption numbers. Ever.

Under Myerson’s leadership and during the leadership void that followed, Microsoft announced Windows 10 active device milestones at 200 million (January 2016), 270 million (March 2016), 300 million (July 2016), 400 million (September 2016), 600 million in November 2017, (almost) 700 million (May 2018), 800 million (March 2019), 825 million (May 2019), and 900 million (late September 2019). And probably several others; it was tedious researching that.

Under Panay’s, um, oversight, Microsoft announced Windows 11 active device milestones … never. Not even one time.

There are many reasons for this, key among them, I believe, that the only hard number anyone will ever associate with Panos Panay is the $900 million write-down that Microsoft was forced to take when it manufactured too many first-generation Surface RT tablets because he had insisted it would be the volume seller. But Panay and Microsoft also understood that Windows 11’s arbitrary hardware requirements would hinder upgrades among both consumers and businesses. And with the PC market sliding into the toilet in the post-pandemic year of 2021 when Windows 11 was first announced, its numbers would be further hobbled.

This environment was bad for Windows 11, but it was perfect for Panay. He could just speak with the same vagaries that have dominated Microsoft’s quarterly earnings reports in recent years and forego the hard numbers. And he would simply position Windows 11 as being more successful than Windows  10, comfortable in the knowledge that no one would ever know any better.

In May 2022, Panay humble-bragged about Windows 11 momentum, claiming that “people are accepting the upgrade offer at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10.” This, to Panay, was a hard number, or what he called “a data standpoint.”

But here’s some real data. At that point, Windows 11 was 7 months old. By comparison, Windows 10 was in active use on 200 million devices after 7 months. Now, that doesn’t mean that Windows 11 was on over 400 million devices when Panay said that, as we don’t know what percentage of the Windows 11 user base consisted of those who upgraded for free from Windows 7, 8, and 10. But it had to have been a pretty big percentage: PCs sold 90 million PCs in Q4 2021 and then 79.2 million in Q1 2022, and those two quarters occurred between the release of Windows 11 and Panay’s momentum statement. Assuming half of all PCs sold ran Windows 11, that’s about 80 million active devices right there. And the combined Windows 7, 8, and 10 installed base at the time of the Windows 11 launch was well north of one billion. How few people took Microsoft up on its free Windows upgrade offer?

Panay also claimed at the time that “businesses right now, they’re adopting Windows 11 faster than we saw in any previous version of Windows.” This is an outright lie with little need for debate: Businesses adopted Windows 7 at a faster rate than at any time in history, and it was so fast that Microsoft cooked the books to make it appear that it was selling a suspiciously consistent 20 million licenses each month for almost three years straight. Windows 8, 10, and 11 never saw that kind of adoption rate.

But Panay also uttered an actual hard number in that same momentum discussion, albeit one designed to mask the truth by commingling the usage numbers for all Windows versions.

“We [Windows] have more than 1.4 billion users across the world,” he said, adding, “that number continues to grow.” Compared to what? Terry Myerson had announced at Build 2014, almost 10 years earlier, that there were 1.5 billion Windows users. The number had fallen.

Unfortunately for Panay, we now have the real number that matters: Two years later, there are over 400 million active Windows 11 PCs in the world. That means that there are over one billion PCs (and other devices, but mostly PCs) not running Windows 11, mostly Windows 10 based on usage data. And while the StatCounter data cited in that last link doesn’t directly line up—23.6 percent of 1.4 billion is only 330 million—almost one billion PCs out in the world are still running Windows 10 no matter how you slice it.

Put another way, Windows 10 first hit that one billion milestone in 2020 and here we are, over three years later, and it’s still in roughly the same place despite two years of Windows 11 in the market. The StatCounter numbers roughly confirm this: The month before Windows 11 launched, Windows 10 accounted for 79.84 percent of all PC usage; two years later, it had only fallen 8-ish percent to 71.62 percent. I hope Terry Myerson is proud of that resiliency, at least.

And one more thing about that two-year time frame: When you look back at how Windows 10 was doing after a similar period of time and do a bit of math, you see that it was used on approximately 740 million active devices after two years. Which is well above the usage today of Windows 11. Almost double, in fact.

Some may wish to be fair to Windows 11 and Panay and point out that Windows 10 compared much more favorably to its reviled predecessor than Windows 11 did, and it was thus a more urgent upgrade. That it landed at the right time for business upgrades. And that the Windows 10 upgrade was open to basically everybody, not some artificial subset.

This is all true and worth discussing. But these numbers speak for themselves, even with the caveats. And if we look at the two-year period after Windows 10 launched, we see something starkly different from today: Windows 7 still accounted for 45.73 percent of PC usage, but its lead over Windows 10, with 36.93 percent of that usage, was slim and narrowing sharply. Today, the gap between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is still wide, and while it’s technically narrowing, it’s a subtle shift over time, not a sharp change.

Numbers can be a cruel mistress when they don’t tell the story you want to tell. That’s why Panos Panay never mentioned them.