Microsoft is 7.5 percent of the way to its goal of a flat billion devices running Windows 10 in the next few years. Today the software giant announced that its latest operating system, Windows 10, is now running on 75 million machines.
The company also made an interesting declaration in a tweet storm notable for numbering its entries twice, which went as follows:
Those two figures are Microsoft’s pitch to developers: Windows 10 is accreting market share, and users of the code are downloading more apps. Or more simply, the sooner you build for Windows 10, the logic appears to go, the sooner you can tap into a growing, engaged user base.
I suspect that early adopters of Windows 10 are more technologically-savvy than the average PC users, so to see a higher per-user app download rate this early into the life of the operating system isn’t surprising. The ratio noted, however, could be far enough — in a ∆ sense — from the implied differential from our point to allow for modest optimism. That’s your call.
Still, I want to make fun of myself before we go. Earlier this month I wrote a piece on Windows 10 with my colleague Ron Miller. The following is from that piece:
I was too conservative. Consider myself to be sufficiently castigated.
We’ve known since before the launch of Windows 10 that Microsoft can’t not release Windows 10 download and engagement numbers. You can lay your own odds on the scale of today’s news. 75 million in less than a month is a more than sufficient start, but I have little data on per-day activations, so I can’t say where the Windows 10 ecosystem will be in a year.