The elephant in the room

Microsoft's missed billion-install Windows 10 target continues to reverberate, but I've noticed a subtle shift in today's coverage. Friday's stories were pretty much just reporting on the event itself, and repeating Microsoft's statements explaining the shortfall, but today's commentary seems to be a little more skeptical.

Por ejemplo, take this piece, from ChannelBiz:

Back in April 2015, when Windows 10 was initially released, Microsoft was already facing a dramatic decline in sales of its Lumia devices.

In Microsoft’s financial year 2015, which ran from July 2014 to June 2015, Microsoft sold just shy of 37 million units, a 57 percent drop from the previous year. To compare, Microsoft has sold just 2.3 million units in the first quarter of 2016. But Windows 10 was launched in Microsoft’s third quarter of 2015, so the company knew full well that it shouldn’t account Windows Phone sales for much in its one billion devices predictions.

That leaves us with the elephant in the room – desktops.

As we speak, the desktop market is continuing on its unrecoverable decline. Worldwide PC shipments totalled 64.8 million units in the first quarter of 2016, a 9.6 percent decline from the first quarter of 2015, according to Gartner.

This was the sixth consecutive quarter of PC shipment declines, and the first time since 2007 that shipment volume fell below 65 million units.

Not good news. The first 12 months of Microsoft’s Windows 10 journey always relied upon the free upgrade for existing desktop and laptop users. This accounts for much of Microsoft’s much-applauded 350 million device install base.

Or this piece, from the Inquirer: 

Microsoft has blamed the shortfall on failings in its phone business, but the mobile platform has never had a particularly strong user base and was unlikely to generate a huge part of the total figure.

It is also likely that installations on laptops and other desktop machines have perhaps not been as high as hoped, especially given some of the negative backlash after Microsoft's attempts to enforce the Windows 10 update on all users.

The free update to Windows 10 will expire in a few weeks, which will undoubtedly slow the uptake even more, and is not why the folks at Redmond have had to admit defeat in their goal of one billion devices on Windows 10 by 2018.

Microsoft's PR-fu has been pretty effective for most of #upgradegate, helping them to manage the simmering backlash, but it's looking more and more like the effectiveness of their GWX push was a big part of that -- with their GWX revealed as not only unpleasant, and demonstrably actionable, but also as failing to meet their install base targets, the tide of opinion seems to finally be turning against Redmond's heavy-handed tactics. Everything was permissible, it seems, as long as they were succeeding, but to pull so many underhanded tricks and then fall short may be a bridge too far.

I say "may" because, so far at least, their share price doesn't seem to be suffering much on this news; we'll have to see how well that holds, if the end-of-month market share numbers show little or no movement for Windows 10 (which is my prediction). For now, though, everyones' jobs appear to be safe enough in Redmond.