Eight Million Business PCs Now Running Windows 10

Microsoft held its Windows 10 device event today in NYC and at the keynote, they announced 110 million installs of Windows 10 and of that figure, 8 million of them are in the enterprise.

The strong interest in Windows 10 has to be a relief for Microsoft as the previous generation OS, Windows 8, was largely avoided by corporations because of its steep learning curve after it launched without a Start menu. The early adoption figures for Windows 10 into the Enterprise show promise that Microsoft will not end up with Windows 7 becoming the next Windows XP where they were forced to extend the lifecycle of the OS after corporations struggled to upgrade their internal systems.

One financial institution, Bank of America, has already said that they intend to upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as possible, which is a big win for Microsoft on two fronts. First, Bank of America is a large organization and can be used as a case study to help other companies move to the new OS and second, banking institutions are generally the slowest to consider upgrading. Seeing that this bank has already announced its intentions to look at the new OS, this could be the first of a wave of companies who will go from considering Windows 10 to begin preparing to upgrade their machines.

The last figure Microsoft announced for business machines running Windows 10 was 1.5 million, so this new figure represents a sizable jump in corporate exploration of the new OS. The real question is how many of those trying out the new OS will fully deploy Windows 10 to their networks.