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.
This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support — so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That’s because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%.
I certainly hope so. And at this point Linux is too big to fail. And some clever people are shaping it and keeping corporate interests in check.
It’s an interesting situation. Linux is on my computer and helps me emancipate myself and stay in control. At the same time it’s also Linux powering the cloud and the big services.
Plus I even have Linux on my phone. But it’s usually a really weird one, full of Google stuff and spyware. (Well… mine isn’t.)
But I feel how things change. It’s getting harder each day to live without smartphones, proprietary apps and cloud services. And since everyone else is doing it, the alternatives might just vanish. I still don’t understand why companies forfeit control, even if they have a appropriate size and business type where it makes sense to have own people and hardware, but hey…