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%.
Interestingly enough, it’s the opposite at my company. Mostly due to how damn fucking expensive things like AWS are.
We priced out a VM host, and we determined that if we strongly policed turning off the VMs when we weren’t using them, using AWS would cost as much as a completely new local VM host every 6 months. And again, that is IF we police the fuck out of turning off the VMs, which we all knew wouldn’t happen.
We have local VM hosts now.
Interesting, I’m assuming you’re comparing running via ECS yeah? My current gripe is that doing everything serverless is reasonably priced, but it ends up adding a bunch of annoying complexity. Like enough that after more than a year we still don’t have things standardized all that well and I still get bitten by stuff sometimes.
Edit: sorry you said VMs referring to cloud hosted too, I missed that. Yeah, that’s expensive, and the serverless alternatives can get annoying.