Windows 10 in Use on More Than 600 Million Active Devices

Back at Microsoft's Build 2015, Terry Myerson, head of the Windows division at Microsoft, said the company expected Windows 10 to be on more than 1 billion devices in two to three years. 

However, one year after Windows 10 was released, the company looked at the 300 million active Windows 10 devices and admitted it would take longer than 12-24 months to grab another 700,000 active new Windows 10 devices. And at Build 2017 in May -- two years after the original goal was set -- Microsoft was only halfway to its original goal with 500 million active devices.

At Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting today, CEO Satya Nadella said Windows 10 is now running on more than 600 million active devices worldwide. As you can see from the first chart, based on when Microsoft has reported the number of active Windows 10 users, it's taken 18 months for the number of active Windows 10 users to double from 300 million to 600 million.

Let's take a closer look at how these new 100 million devices compare to past updates to the company's growth numbers for Windows 10.

Over the last two years, the average daily rate of new Windows 10 devices (where "new" is either a device that's being upgraded or is a new purchase, period) has had mixed periods of increases and decreases. From June 2016 to May of this year, adoption rate was on a downhill run. But as you can see, that trend has been reversing over the last few months.