How big is big or big enough? 100 millions users; A billion users? Big numbers are in the news again, as Microsoft confirms that there are around 700 million Windows 10 devices today.
Microsoft was targeting one billion Windows 10 devices three years after the official release of the operating system.
According to the numbers, until the end of July 2018 The company could see the magic billion.
But many believe that Microsoft will not reach the target of the billion, due to its decision to leave smartphones.
When it envisioned and set a billion target in 2014, Microsoft owned Nokia's smartphone business and used Windows 10 on its mobile devices. But the company quickly abandoned the idea of a smartphone.
But the big number makes sense: the more users running Windows 10, the easier it will be for the company to roll out new features faster. services to make the vision of Windows aw a service a reality, with many third-party developers engaging and building with the platform, for the platform. It's also worth mentioning that today there are many more computers running Windows, but not Windows 10.
But what do the numbers say about the other two major functional, Android and iOS? As it turns out, considering the total installations, but also the numbers of devices that use the latest versions of operating systems, things are not bad.
In February, Apple announced that it has 1,3 billion (active) devices running its operating system: Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watches.
Now it's hard to know how many of those are what, but Apple says 76% of the devices they have access in the App Store are running iOS 11. This suggests that the total number on the latest version of iOS is between 700 and 800 million devices.
As for Android, last year Google said it had two billion active Android users, so the number is likely to have grown even more. However, they all use different versions of a very fragmented operating system.
Even the most popular version of Android, Nougat, released in August 2016, has a market share of 31%, which means it has about the same number of users as Windows 10.
Android Marshmallow, which was released at the same time as Windows 10, accounts for about a quarter of all Android users. Android Oreo, released last summer, is only available to 6% of Android device users.
What will follow?
In recent years we have seen excessive use of Android and iOS devices because we buy fewer computers. This may change as the smartphone market also reaches saturation. So all the big companies seem to be looking for the next big idea.
Most of the big tech companies are betting that some kind of virtual reality or augmented reality glasses will be the next innovation.
Microsoft has HoloLens, while Apple's smart glasses program is carefully hidden. Google has been experimenting with several devices for years.
After the big numbers and a big question:
Can these companies use their massive customer base to cash in on the next wave of technology? It is now clear that everyone is looking at AI, with experiments in digital assistants, for mobile devices or for home. Amazon did not let the opportunity go to waste.
The company had a different kind of users, from hundreds of millions of buyers of many different products. By that logic, another big rival is Facebook, with two billion users and clear indications that it is interested in AR and VR.
Having a huge audience captive seems to be the key to success. So what remains to be seen, we prisoners, is who will win next.
- Facebook downvote and upvote new add-on with the goal of failure
- iTunes adds the app to the Windows Store
