Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
I wonder if there’s any correlation with AI killing the office job market.
Everyone talking about how it’s because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they’re ignoring the big one:
People don’t need as many computers these days. You don’t have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.
Yeah this happened in Japan way earlier. Japan got mobile internet much sooner than the rest of the world it was called i-mode. Which was launched in 1999. The home computer boom never happened there like it did in the West. Since everyone just uses their mobile phone to go in the internet and Japanese PCs were expensive. And doing work after hours at home wasn’t a thing since you do that at the office where your boss can see you putting in the work. The only PCs that sold reasonably well were VAIOs since those were relatively compact.
It’s also why computer literacy is very low in Japan, ask anyone who taught in Japan and they will tell you most Japanese high school students don’t know how to use a computer. Like the problems we are seeing now in the West with computer literacy among students they had for decades already.
Exactly. My wife hasn’t used an actual computer more than a handful of times in the last several years. She does EVERYTHING on her smartphone.
I have never owned a laptop, because my desktop unit is where I do most of my business stuff, and when I’m away from that, my smartphone is good enough.
Of course, the most important thing isn’t that we account for two less computers than a few years ago, but the smartphones that we have replaced laptops with, run Android. So that’s actually a net loss of 4 MS products.
And after all these years, Windows products still make me frustrated and infuriated. You’d think they would have honed it to a perfect product by now, but every few years they completely reconfigure the UI, and make us have to navigate a whole new, buggy system.
I keep having to remind people around me that phones are the primary computing device for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
I think you’re right on this. People aren’t moving away from MS because of their obnoxious behaviour. They’re moving to alternate form factors and dealing with Apple’s and Google’s obnoxious behaviour instead. People are willing to put up with a metric ton of bullshit so they don’t have to actually do anything for themselves.
I don’t think their obnoxious behavior is completely unrelated. After all, people aren’t choosing windows phones or tablets either.
Looks around my living room, 3 laptops, stationary, 1 nas and a server. 2 laptops are still running windows.
You are an outlier.
If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans…
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it’s M$… 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It’s almost like there’s a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame …
But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?
There’s no “learning” anymore, there’s riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you’re not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.
It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
i was a MS employee once. Windows hasn’t been their focus since Windows XP. Once they discovered the profit margins of Office 98… Windows was just a way to keep you using Office
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.
It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
I could imagine a future where Windows is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.
Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!
MS did a shift like that already. The shift from MS-DOS to NT was transparent to the vast majority of people to the point that most people didn’t realize they were two different OSes.
I don’t see why they couldn’t do it again. NTVDM was similar in concept to what wine does. Imagine if MS actively contributed to wine, or a wine like project.
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This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
We’re in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We’d have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to “upgrade” itself during the night without him agreeing to it.
How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?
Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.
On the server side I can agree, but linux does not get device drivers for majority of hardware let alone regular device driver updates. That fact alone makes the entire company un-compliant in many industries.
You could get an entire fleet of linux supported laptops and get then compliance becomes easier to manage since the software on linux lends well to sys admin fleet control. You would have to push patches weekly to the fleet which would result in a ton of random user bugs.
does not get device drivers for majority of hardware
Literally lying
switched to Linux and don’t regret it. fuck copilot, laggy ass UI, terabyte of ram usage, forced updates and any other bullshit they can come up with.
Would say that the businesses are still propping up Windows hard whilst the personal space is pretty much dying. I mean, most of the younger generation are using tablets or phones more than a PC these days. I would argue that unless you’re in need of that power, those tablets or phones could do everything they need like drawing, gaming or streaming.
If businesses gave Microsoft the flick, it would devastate their bottom line a lot.
As much as I want to joke that it is the year of the Linux desktop, I think it is mostly because the younger you are the less likely you are to have a pc (so Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD for the dozens of you).
As far as I can see most of the time people use their phone for everything and only touch a pc for work or if they have a hobby that requires the use of a pc (gaming, digital art, music, programming, etc…).
The search function has never been the same since vista. I’m not doing a web search from the search bar. I am specifically searching for files on my computer. F-off. And now I’m constantly asked to save to some cloud I don’t give a shit about.
You sound grumpy. You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems too I bet… ha ha ha l o l
You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems
It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.
Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.
Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
You mother fucker… You’re hired.
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They would have way higher ratio of supporters if they stayed at XP or 7, and just keep security patching it but no, they deliberately sabotaged their star product with Vista, 8, 10, and 11. They deserved it.
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It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that’s winning here.
These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
This aligns with statcounter data here: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202505
Windows market share on desktop has been slowly but steadily declining. From 95+% in 2009, to almost 70% today. In the same time period Linux went up from 0.6% to 4%, which is not bad.
Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is… I don’t really believe it, but really cool if true.
It can also be noted that the trend over time for the “unknown” category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the “unknown” category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.
So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
Kids mostly use mobile devices and don’t even know what a folder is, so both.
Most excellent news!
