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 percen...