Microsoft Hits Home Run, Announces 75 Million Installs For Windows 10

All of the controversy surrounding Windows 10 hasn’t stopped PC users from upgrading to the operating system at a furious pace. Over the past month, we’ve heard speculation that installs had surpassed the 25 million mark, with some estimates as high as 67 million. But the only official figure from Microsoft was announced one day after the Windows 10’s July 29th launch: 14 million installs in 24 hours.

Now as we approach the one month mark, Microsoft has given us a progress update on Windows 10 installs, and it’s a whopper of a number. Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi announced in a tweet that Windows 10 has been installed on 75 million machines.

Considering that Windows 10 is a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, we shouldn’t be too shocked to see that 75 million users have taken the plunge. Given the free nature of Windows 10, it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison with previous Windows launches. But just for reference, we can state that Microsoft sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses within one month of launch, but it took another five months before the company was able to announce that it surpassed the 100 million licenses sold threshold.

In addition to the status update on Windows 10 installs, Mehdi also revealed in a series of tweets that Windows 10 has been installed on machines running in 192 countries, more than 90,000 unique PC or tablet models have been upgraded to Windows 10, and that “more than 122 years of gameplay have streamed from Xbox One to Windows 10 devices.”

So where do we go from here? Microsoft has lofty ambitions for Windows 10, which is its vision of Windows as a service. Windows 7 and Windows 8 users that haven’t already upgraded to Windows 10 still have until July 29, 2016 to do so. And we can’t forget that most new PC shipping in the closing months of 2015 and definitely the majority shipping in 2016 will have Windows 10 preinstalled.

Microsoft itself is projecting that there will be 1 billion devices running Windows 10 within two to three years. That’s a lofty figure, but we’re sure that Microsoft will be able to hit the mark.