During its earnings call today, Microsoft revealed that there are now over 1.3 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 (via ZDNet). The new milestone comes just over a year after Microsoft announced that it had finally hit its goal of having one billion devices running Windows 10.
That fast growth can be attributed in no small part to the increased demand for PCs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world in the past year. In its earnings report for the past quarter, Microsoft reported a 10% increase in Windows OEM revenue, meaning its partners have been selling more PCs. Similarly, Surface revenue was up 12% according to the company"s report.
Another potential driving factor in Windows 10 adoption is the fact that Windows 7 is no longer supported outside of enterprise customers paying for extended security updates, which aren"t cheap. In order to stay secure, more and more companies had to upgrade to the newer version of the OS.
While growth has been pretty healthy for Microsoft"s OS in the past year, Windows 10 adoption was actually a lot slower than the company had hoped for when it initially introduced the operating system. In 2015, Microsoft said it hoped to reach one billion active devices within the next three years, which would have been in the summer of 2018. In fairness, at the time, the announcement included all kinds of devices that Microsoft wanted to offer Windows 10 on, including phones, an effort that fell by the wayside after a couple of years.
It"s a day of milestones for Microsoft products, as you"d expect from an earnings day. The company has also revealed that its Teams communication service now has over 145 million daily active users, and Office 365 has 300 million paid seats, with 50 million users subscribed to Microsoft 365 for consumers.