Did Windows just lose 400 million users? Microsoft caught red-handed editing figures

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, published a new article on the Windows Experience Blog that revealed the total number of Windows users. Microsoft quietly updated that statistic after reports were published that showed, according to Microsoft's own figures, it had lost 400 million Windows users in just three years.

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Using the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the internet, we can see Microsoft initially wrote the following: "Today, Windows is the most widely used operating system, powering over a billion monthly active devices through an open and flexible platform that connects people." That figure of "over a billion monthly active devices" was then updated to this: "Today, Windows is the most widely used operating system, powering over 1.4 billion monthly active devices through an open and flexible platform that connects people."

Why did Microsoft update it?Reports surfaced shortly after this blog post was picked up that compared Microsoft's figure of "over a billion monthly active devices" to what the company was touting in a 2022 annual report of the same month, where it said, "There are now 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or Windows 11." Comparing the two figures, it's easy to work out that Microsoft supposedly lost 400 million Windows devices in the span of just three years.

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Microsoft promptly updated the blog post after headlines started popping up saying it lost hundreds of millions of Windows users, with the Redmond company not even providing a statement explaining whether it was a typo or a mistake.

As mentioned in the numerous articles about Windows' reported exodus, Microsoft hardly ever provides any internal figures on its software, leading many to summarize that if Microsoft is stating a number that numerous high-level executives and lawyers have vetted it, as touting any figure can impact the company's stock prices and cause market swings.

However, the importance of Microsoft providing a specific number has now been thrown into question, as the company can seemingly change the figure by 400 million at the drop of a hat without even mentioning it. Now we don't really know how many Windows users there are. Is it approximately one billion or 1.4 billion?