Microsoft’s latest version of its Windows operating system, Windows 10, now runs on 270 million devices. Microsoft confirmed the figures at its annual Build conference in San Francisco yesterday.
Microsoft also revealed that users had spent over 75 billion hours on the new operating system and asked Cortana, the digital personal assistant baked into the OS, over 5 billion questions. The Windows Store, a central repository for applications, is seeing 5 billion visits from users monthly. The company is said to be merging the Windows Store and the Xbox Store soon so that users can access content from a central place regardless of the Microsoft devices they are using. Universal Windows applications will also be made available to the Xbox One. Xbox users have spent a total of 6.6 billion hours playing games.
The growth of Windows 10’s install base less than a year since it was first introduced has been as a result of a big push by Microsoft. The company has been using various means to prompt users to download and install the Windows 10 update. This has included erratically forcing the download on users, a situation that forced the company to apologize at one point. Making the update available for free to users of the popular Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 for the first year has also gone a long way in contributing to its fast adoption. In fact, according to Microsoft, Windows 10 is its fastest growing version of Windows ever.
Windows 10’s growth comes as no surprise. In just 24 hours of its launch, it was running on 14 million devices. The number rose to over 60 million in 2 days and it’s been nothing but an upward trajectory ever since for the nascent operating system.
Microsoft has since rolled out several major updates to the operating system fixing bugs and introducing several features. The Windows 10 November Update brought several features to Microsoft’s core Windows 10 apps. Most requested additions like extensions to its Edge browser are currently under testing while we still don’t have any official confirmation yet on whether the company will bring back the much-loved placeholders to its OneDrive app. Microsoft is set to release a new update, Redstone, which the company is calling the ‘Windows 10 Anniversary Update’, by June 2016.
Early this month, the company started rolling out the Windows 10 update to mobile devices, a move expected to further increase the number of devices running Windows 10.
