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%.
In my experience, this is usually the result of DRM. Most of my physical library of PC games doen’t work because they use some kind of variation of StarForce. If you go back far enough, yes the old 16-bit titles don’t work, and DOS hasn’t been properly supported since pre-XP. Things like games not supporting widescreen resolutions or running some kind of bizarre deprecated library is often quite fixable. For all the criticisms I have of Windows, getting old games to work hasn’t really been one of them.
Games for Windows Live can go to hell though.
When it comes to 16-bit games dosbox(-x) and other derivatives are your friends. Works on both windows and Linux