This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans...
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it's M$... 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft's lunch.
It's too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform -- Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera -- all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It's only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
I could imagine a future where Windows is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.
Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!
MS did a shift like that already. The shift from MS-DOS to NT was transparent to the vast majority of people to the point that most people didn't realize they were two different OSes.
I don't see why they couldn't do it again. NTVDM was similar in concept to what wine does. Imagine if MS actively contributed to wine, or a wine like project.
This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
You mother fucker... You're hired.
It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that's winning here.
These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
For most people, a tablet is a direct replacement for a laptop anyway, especially with a wireless keyboard. I run software for work that, as far as I know, is Windows only, but most people will be fine with a tablet, or even just a phone.
We're in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We'd have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to "upgrade" itself during the night without him agreeing to it.
Wish you success in the migration
Everyone talking about how it's because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they're ignoring the big one:
People don't need as many computers these days. You don't have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.
I think you're right on this. People aren't moving away from MS because of their obnoxious behaviour. They're moving to alternate form factors and dealing with Apple's and Google's obnoxious behaviour instead. People are willing to put up with a metric ton of bullshit so they don't have to actually do anything for themselves.
I keep having to remind people around me that phones are the primary computing device for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
They don’t care they have Azure now.
The search function has never been the same since vista. I'm not doing a web search from the search bar. I am specifically searching for files on my computer. F-off. And now I'm constantly asked to save to some cloud I don't give a shit about.
My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don't need it anymore.
People ditching their PC because they don't need it anymore doesn't explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don't need it than Mac or Linux users.
I think thats exactly it. A lot of the people begrudgingly have a PC. I bet most of those just use whatever the PC came with. Linux and Mac users are more likely to enjoy using a PC.
Just want to say, Google Docs is NOT free. Just because you don't send them money doesn't mean you aren't paying.
What is free though is LibreOffice, or some Nextcloud document addons (to a degree) if ”cloud” is the thing.
It's almost like if you piss off your users then they'll ditch you.
It's Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
I think it's more to do with phones - people are just more likely to do most tasks on a phone rather than a laptop.
Forcing people to buy a new computer for nothing more than a security chip on the motherboard will do that
They also had pretty strict CPU requirements. Mostly only 8th gen and newer, or a ryzen, would be required.
No source for the blog post. Here it is: windows blog
Note that the number has been updated, and at the bottom they state that that figure has been updated.
The original text said 'over a billion'. 1.4 billion is over a billion.
Yeah, this is just terrible journalism.
I love how they went into so much detail about why the old numbers would be accurate, then proceed to say they can 'safely' say that windows has lost 400 million users over a sentence on a blog stating windows has 'over a billion users'.
Just pure greed and giving users less and less control of an OS will push people away. It did for me outside of work. I don't have any reason to touch Windows that often.
I'm about to make it one more...
Enshittification will do that, yep
They just had to copy the walled garden approach of the competitors, and badly at that. They could have not pursued forcing users to a Microsoft account. They could've avoided the telemetry and ads business(/bloat). Google has them beat there anyway. They had the more open alternative to Google and Apple but they're trying terribly to be second fiddle to them. And now Linux has become a good enough alternative to what Windows should've been. They are still the choice for business machines, but they've been terrible with consumer devices.
I haven’t had windows for 5 or 6 years when I switched to Mac. But earlier this year I bought a cheap Windows 11 machine because Windows was required for a contract I thought I was going to get (but didn’t). I was going to return it but thought meh it might be nice to have a personal laptop I can play around with. But I was unimpressed with Windows 11 so much that it mostly gathers dust now.
I’m thinking this is the perfect opportunity to take the plunge into Linux. Has anyone on here used Linux and have any advice?
As everyone here will say. Go with linux mint. Haven't used windows in months now and when I do need to its generally way more of a pain to do anything. Plus. Ms wants to shove their shitty ai in my face at all times (so they can recoup the billions they've most pouring into a buzzword). So I refuse to use it.
You will need to have a learning curve with linux. Is basically a German car:" oh wow, this is so genius I love how this was designed! "And then "why the hell do i need a custom 12 pt socket to get this one bolt and why is it completely inaccessbile just to change a brake rotor"
I was one of the 400 million.
Given there’s 7 billion people on earth, I’m a bit surprised this number is so low at only 1.4 billion. People will usually have a home computer and then use one at work, plus all the devices in data centers and other environments where they are not used as a desktop.
Developing world is more about mobile than PC, so that does explain part of the discrepancy.
I'll be joining soon enough, going to dual boot with Linux. Only keeping windows for games that won't work on Linux.
I wonder how many millions of computers are going to end up getting thrown away because they don't meet the ridiculous requirements for windows 11.
