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 ...