Microsoft announced two major Windows 10 milestones this morning: There are now over 350 million devices running Windows 10. And the system’s first major and free upgrade, called the Anniversary update, will arrive on August 2.
I spoke with Microsoft’s Terry Myerson about these developments last week, and I’ll focus on the new usage figure here.
Myerson told me that while the 350 million figure was important, Microsoft used other metrics to measure its success.
“The world is loving Windows 10,” he told me. “And customer satisfaction is at an all-time high. That is how we view success.”
Fair enough. But you may recall that I’ve been closely watching the Windows 10 rollout in order to compare it with Windows 7, generally considered the most successful Windows version ever.
That OS achieved a regular cadence of 20 million new licenses per month during a period of time in which Microsoft cooked the books a bit to provide some financial stability.
Things have changed since then. Windows 10 has been in market for less than a year, and Microsoft is no longer evening out how it reports Windows 10 adoption, so the numbers tend to bounce around a bit more than in the past. And of course Microsoft is now measuring actual, real-world adoption of Windows 10, and not just license sales as it did with Windows 7. This makes the delta between Windows 10 adoption and that of Windows 7 even more impressive.
