Since making that promise in 2015, the company has been banking on that statement to try and draw third-party developers into building apps for Windows 10.
Advertisement
Currently, nearly a year since the launch, the film has amassed 350 million users. Combined with continuing consumer resistance to PC upgrades from select groups, Windows 10 has failed to gain the traction Microsoft expected.
With the Windows 10 free upgrade offer coming to an end, Microsoft is desperate to get everyone switched over to its latest operating system.
Microsoft is backing off its ambitious goal of getting Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by 2018.
And the performance of the Windows platform in the smartphone segment is decidedly poor, make no mistake about it. More so because the company is slowly but surely diverting its resources and attention elsewhere – leading to yet further slips.
Microsoft has admitted that the firm’s lofty goal of Windows 10 running on one billion machines by 2018 is unlikely to happen. After the free period expires, Microsoft will then sell the Windows 10 Home edition for $119 and the Pro edition for $199.
Microsoft has now said it will roll out an update that will change the alerts it uses for Windows 10 to prevent complaints such as this from happening again. In reality, Microsoft’s latest financial report as early as January this year revealed that the mobile division was dying a slow death, reporting a 57% year-on-year sales drop for the period.
Meanwhile, the company from Redmond has announced several times that Windows 10 is the “last”. The company’s smartphone sales totaled just 2.3 million in the first three months of 2016.
The reason? The disappointing numbers of the mobile version of the OS known as Windows 10 Mobile. The company also made it hard for users to decline the upgrade and even the update even upgraded some users’ computers without their explicit consent.
Advertisement
The current growth rate on PCs is about as good as Microsoft could expect, IDC analyst Al Gillen said in an email. So before they have to pay for it, which will happen after 29th July, users would do well to get it installed, now that it is being offered for free.
