14 DAY TRIAL // Back in July 2015, when it officially launched Windows 10, Microsoft also announced one very ambitious target for the new operating system: 1 billion devices running it by FY2018.
The company said on every single occasion that it was advancing at a desired pace towards this goal, with the most recent announcement indicating that Windows 10 was running on 350 million devices around the world, including here both PCs and smartphones.
And yet, Microsoft has finally admitted that bringing Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by FY2018 is now pretty much impossible, and it has a good reason for this failure: Windows phones.
Sales of Windows phones collapsed
The company suggests that the drop of Windows phones has dragged Windows 10 adoption down, with estimates made by ZDNet revealing that the company would have achieved its goal of 1 billion installs if it had sold 50 million Windows Phone devices after the launch of Windows 10 Mobile.
“Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350 million monthly active devices, with record customer satisfaction and engagement. We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices. In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices - and increasing customer delight with Windows,” Yusuf Mehdi, chief of the Windows marketing unit, said.
Sales of Windows phones collapsed, and so did its market share, with the latest data indicating that Microsoft’s platform was only running on 0.7 percent of devices around the world.
Furthermore, even though Windows phones will get the Anniversary Update on August 2, 2016 is the year of the PC, with Microsoft itself admitting that more cool stuff will be happening for mobile devices in 2017. The company hasn’t said what exactly it means by that, but people with knowledge of the matter have suggested that the Surface Phone is very likely to be unveiled in spring 2017, running Windows 10 Mobile and featuring the best in terms of hardware.