How to lie with statistics: Microsoft edition

Having just announced that they'll fall short of their 1B by 2018 target for Windows 10, Microsoft are now changing their chosen metric, so that their failure will look less like failure.

At least, that's my read on the latest pronouncement from Satya Nadella, as reported by Business Insider:

Microsoft was recently forced to delay its ambitious goal of getting 1 billion devices onto Windows 10 within the next two years, after its collapsing phone business made that an unrealistic milestone.

Instead, CEO Satya Nadella announced Tuesday during the company's quarterly earnings callthat Microsoft will change the way it reports the number of Windows 10 installations (currently at over 350 million), reflecting a shift in how it thinks about the operating system.

"We changed how we will assess progress," Nadella says.

Now, instead of the irregular updates on Windows 10 growth we've been gotten for the last year, mainly at Microsoft conferences and events, Nadella says Microsoft will share monthly active users on the operating system "regularly."

Notably, instead of installations, Microsoft is now tracking monthly active users of Windows 10 — the same kind of metric used to track services like Google's Gmail, which has a billion monthly active users.

And what does "regularly" mean? Who knows? With Windows 10 rapidly approaching its first birthday, maybe it'll become just another line item on the quarterly earnings report.

I guess this means that Nadella & co. have no intention of ever commenting on when they expect to eventually hit that 1B installed target, huh?


Fortunately, Microsoft aren't the only ones measuring their progress; I'll be keeping an eye on NetMarketShare,  for one, and other industry analysts will be doing their own assessments. It's telling, though, that Microsoft have decided that they're going to redefine success, immediately after announcing that they've failed to achieve success, according to their own milestone.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is... how do you say.... horseshit. It's classic statistical shenanigans, of a kind that should be ringing alarms bells with anyone who owns Microsoft stock.

I stand by my earlier predictions:

1. when NetMarketShare releases their July OS market share report, it will show essentially no movement for Windows 10, and
2. someone at Microsoft will be thrown under the bus over this -- it's just a question of who, and when.