Microsoft: No, we haven't lost 400 million Windows customers

Windows 10 is reaching its end-of-life phase in a few months, and Microsoft ideally wants as many people on Windows 11 as possible. That said, the company seemingly understands the popularity of its previous operating system and is giving its customers options to stick with the OS, at a cost (financial and otherwise).

However, there was some turbulence in the Windows journalism media space recently when ZDNet noticed a rather interesting detail in a Microsoft blog post. In that piece, the Redmond tech firm made a throwaway remark in the opening paragraph, saying "Windows is the most widely used operating system, powering over a billion monthly active devices". While this sounds great on paper, eagle-eyed readers of the blog post were quick to spot that this figure is significantly down compared to the 1.4 billion active customers that Microsoft boasted in 2022 and the 1.3 billion that it touted in the year before that.

This would either imply a rounding error or that Microsoft has lost at least 400 million active monthly users in the past three years, and the latter possibility is the headline that most outlets ran with, to no fault of their own. The fact that Redmond was not boasting about the 1.4 billion figure anymore gave credence to the possibility that the number is now much lower.

However, Microsoft has now put an end to these rumors in its own mysterious way. The firm has quietly updated its blog post and changed the problematic "over a billion" text to "over 1.4 billion." An editor's note towards the end of the blog acknowledges the modification.

This confirms that Windows has not lost hundreds of millions of active customers in the years following the debut of Windows 11, but it also highlights the fact that this number has been fairly stagnant for a long period of time. There could be many reasons for this, including the lukewarm reception to Copilot and Windows 11 in general.

It's rather unfortunate that there is no vetted way to quickly know statistics like these. Back in the day, Microsoft used to share interesting statistics and facts about the company and its products on a regular basis on its "Microsoft by the Numbers" website. However, that portal is now defunct and redirects to the Microsoft News page. This means that media outlets like ours and consumers have to rely on the company's obscure blog posts and shareholder letters in order to figure out the current state of Windows and other products.

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