Home windows 10 is reaching its end-of-life part in just a few months, and Microsoft ideally desires as many individuals on Home windows 11 as attainable. That mentioned, the corporate seemingly understands the recognition of its earlier working system and is giving its clients choices to stay with the OS, at a price (monetary and in any other case).

Nevertheless, there was some turbulence within the Home windows journalism media area just lately when ZDNet observed a moderately attention-grabbing element in a Microsoft weblog publish. In that piece, the Redmond tech agency made a throwaway comment within the opening paragraph, saying “Home windows is probably the most extensively used working system, powering over a billion month-to-month energetic units”. Whereas this sounds nice on paper, eagle-eyed readers of the weblog publish had been fast to identify that this determine is considerably down in comparison with the 1.4 billion energetic clients that Microsoft boasted in 2022 and the 1.3 billion that it touted within the 12 months earlier than that.

This could both suggest a rounding error or that Microsoft has misplaced at the very least 400 million energetic month-to-month customers previously three years, and the latter chance is the headline that the majority retailers ran with, to no fault of their very own. The truth that Redmond was not boasting in regards to the 1.4 billion determine anymore gave credence to the chance that the quantity is now a lot decrease.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has now put an finish to those rumors in its personal mysterious manner. The agency has quietly up to date its weblog publish and adjusted the problematic “over a billion” textual content to “over 1.4 billion.” An editor’s observe in the direction of the top of the weblog acknowledges the modification.

This confirms that Home windows has not misplaced lots of of hundreds of thousands of energetic clients within the years following the debut of Home windows 11, however it additionally highlights the truth that this quantity has been pretty stagnant for a protracted time period. There may very well be many causes for this, together with the lukewarm reception to Copilot and Home windows 11 basically.

It is moderately unlucky that there isn’t any vetted approach to rapidly know statistics like these. Again within the day, Microsoft used to share attention-grabbing statistics and information in regards to the firm and its merchandise regularly on its “Microsoft by the Numbers” web site. Nevertheless, that portal is now defunct and redirects to the Microsoft Information web page. Because of this media retailers like ours and shoppers should depend on the corporate’s obscure weblog posts and shareholder letters with a view to determine the present state of Home windows and different merchandise.