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In today's very very long blog post (more than 2,400 words!) about end-of-support options for Windows 10 PCs, Microsoft tried to bury an unpleasant statistic. That data point is tossed off casually in the opening paragraph, as Microsoft executive VP and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi says, "Today, Windows is the most widely used operating system, powering over a billion monthly active devices..." Sounds pretty good, right?
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Well, yes, until you realize that the last time Microsoft bragged about the number of monthly active Windows devices was more than three years ago. In its 2022 annual report, published in January 2022, the company boasted: "There are now more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or Windows 11." And that number was up from 1.3 billion just one year earlier.
Make no mistake about it: When a top Microsoft executive publishes a number like that, it's not some guesstimate; it's considered material information, the sort of data that moves markets and makes the stock price rise or fall. As a result, those numbers are reviewed carefully by the legal department. If the number was still 1.4 billion or even 1.3 billion, that blog post would have said so.
I don't need ChatGPT to tell me that 1.4 billion in January 2022 minus 1 billion in June 2025 means that 400 million Windows PCs have disappeared in the past three and a half years. That's more than one-quarter of the installed base just ... gone.
My takeaway? Windows has indeed lost a big chunk of its installed base in the past three years as consumers retired old PCs and switched to mobile devices or tablets instead of replacing those clunky desktops and laptops. Families that might have had two or three PCs are now sharing one. Back in 2019, I was already seeing signs that the PC market was shrinking ahead of the last big end-of-support milestone.
[T]he PC market is more focused on business and government today than ever before, especially with large organizations scurrying to replace old devices running Windows 7 before the end-of-support date that's now officially less than a year away. [Lenovo, HP, and Dell] have massive armies of salespeople who can write commercial contracts that cover hundreds of thousands or millions of seats at a time. Meanwhile, the consumer market for PCs has all but vanished, with the exception of two groups: gamers and high-income professionals that still need the unique capabilities that a PC or Mac provides. [D]on't be surprised if corporate demand helps make 2019 one last year of flat PC sales before those numbers head south again..
That was a solid prediction -- until the global pandemic happened and the market for PCs and Macs suddenly became relevant again, shifting into overdrive for a couple of extra years.
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