Microsoft: More than half of the Windows devices of the company are now under Windows 10

A little more than a year elapsing before Microsoft no longer supports Windows 7 for free, the company has taken an interesting step. More than half of Windows enterprise devices now use Windows 10, officials said.

Microsoft officials began posting this number at the company's recent Ignite IT Pro conference. During Microsoft's conference call on the first quarter results of fiscal 2014, Oct. 24, CEO, Satya Nadella, said it very clearly, explaining to analysts and urging that "more than half of the installed base of the commercial device is installed on Windows 10. "

When I asked for clarification after Ignite, a spokesman told me that "from Microsoft's data, we can see that there are now more devices in the world." Running Windows 10 than any other earlier version of Windows ".

How does this correspondence with the often quoted Microsoft statistics that there are 200 million Windows 10 commercial devices? This is not really the case, because this figure of 200 million also includes small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers, I was told.

Is it comforting or alarming that just under 50% of Windows devices in businesses still use an earlier version of Windows at this point?

This may not be as worrisome as it may seem, as volume licensees have the means to continue to obtain security patches for Windows 7 after the January 14, 2020 due date – either through the terms of their Software Assurance Agreement and / or pay for these patches through Extended Security Updates.

Microsoft introduced Windows 7 in July 2009. A number of corporate customers have not started to roll out Windows 7 well in its life cycle and in some cases only a few months before Windows 10 is marketed in July 2015.

While Microsoft executives are keen to play Microsoft's transition from Windows to a cloud provider, Windows still represents an important part of Microsoft's global business. Microsoft does not specify how much of its category "More personal computing" comes from Windows. It also includes games, Surface and advertising in this segment, which generated $ 10.7 billion for the quarter. "Productivity and business processes" generated $ 9.8 billion and "Intelligent Cloud", $ 8.6 billion.

Recently, a company executive said that Microsoft 's cloud contributed a little less than a quarter of its total annual business, a percentage that would certainly surprise more, given that Microsoft is talking about the cloud and the little that they talk about Windows these days. .

As usual, Microsoft has played in the growth of its various "commercial services" – Azure, Office 365 Commercial, Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn – as part of its latest results. During the first quarter of fiscal year 19, Microsoft reached $ 8.5 billion in revenue in the commercial cloud, officials said.

An interesting statistic that Microsoft executives have reported: this year, Dynamics ERP / CRM is expected to generate revenue of $ 2.5 billion, half of which comes from Dynamics 365 – and the rest from internal versions of Dynamics . to assume.

Office 365 Commercial subscribers reached the 155 million mark this quarter; The number of Office 365 General Public subscribers is currently 32.5 million. Gaming revenue was up 44 percent for the quarter, with officials citing strong GamePass, Xbox Live and hardware sales ahead of the next holiday season. Server products also continued to show strong growth during the quarter.