Microsoft denies losing 400 million Windows users and replaces bad blog post

Microsoft has responded to reports of the possible loss of 400 million Windows users. The company replaced the vague wording in the document that led to this conclusion.

At the end of June, Microsoft announced new terms of extended support for Windows 10 to avoid paid updates. To do this, you need to use cloud backups or Rewards points. The announcement contained wording that «reduced» the number of Windows users by as much as 400 million — «more than 1 billion» instead of «1.4 billion», which the company wrote about in 2022. This made it possible to draw a conclusion about the decrease in the number of users, but now the wording, on the contrary, indicates an increase.

So, Microsoft replaced the more vague wording «more than 1 billion» with a more precise «more than 1.4 billion», which is based on previous official information. Probably, someone in the company did not know exactly how many Windows users there actually are and did not want to be more precise for this reason, but it turned out to be a bad thing in terms of public opinion. Anyway, Microsoft reacted and changed the text, as shown below.

By request of the site Windows Latest Microsoft explained that the wording of the blog post «more than 1 billion» was due to a simple oversight, not a reduction in the previously stated number from 1.4 billion. The phrase about 1 billion was a mistake.

The company’s explanation makes sense, because 400 million is a huge number of users, a third or a quarter of the total. Such a drop in three years would be catastrophic, and it would be recorded by independent estimates: StatCounter, SimilarWeb, Steam poll etc. Instead, these sources do not reflect anything of the sort.