Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Posted this originally as a reply to a comment, but I think it should be its own top-level comment.
They went all in on pretending to care about quality since the MacBook Neo. The numbers they're seeing must be terrifying.
> They went all in on pretending to care about quality since the MacBook Neo. The numbers they're seeing must be terrifying.
Yeah. Worldwide Neo sales at 5 million units + production raise to 10 million? [1] Even if only 50% of those are US consumers, add to that the number of folks switching over to linux [4]; and suddenly that's not small potatoes, considering there are only about 162 million working folks in the US.
There are only about 50 million folks at 100+ employees, and 16 million at 1000+ employees in private firms. [2]
All these folks switching over? Once they get comfy with non-Windows OSes, they'll ask for those at work. And at the smaller employers - 100 or less employees or even 1000 or less employees, that won't be hard to support, especially if one or two management types make the switch and drive the change.
You have to read a bit between the lines, but an estimate is that 35-50 million have access to Google Workspace at work, and 25-40 million paid Google Workspace users. [3]
And Azure? same number problems, and there seems to be a general discontent with the way things are going with cloud.
Combined with the EU/Worldwide decoupling, suddenly that MS moat isn't looking so deep. It's easy to imagine an inflection point at which MS becomes the minority OS provider, even in the US. The Kodak-ization of Microsoft.
On Nadella's watch, no less. Should we expect a change in leadership soon? Either Nadella deciding to do something different with his time or the Board pushing for a change? They've both got to be seeing the same numbers we are, plus additional insight based on internal metrics.
A Perfect Storm, if you will.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/macbook-ne...
[2] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb.html
[3] https://expertinsights.com/saas-app-security/google-workspac...
[4] updated to reflect that [1] has global sales numbers based on feedback from responses below.
Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources. I'm not sure why you brought the US workforce population into the equation as that mixes up scales, nor is there a 1:1 relationship between people and computers (I have 5 x86 systems and 2 M-series laptops in my home between work and personal use).
Lenovo shipped roughly 16m units in Q1 2026 at #1, with Apple shipping roughly 6m in the same timeframe at #4, WW. [0]
Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up if you want to be targeted towards a particular audience. It's a lot of noise in forums like this, not so much on the general street. Windows overall gaining ~1.1% with Linux overall declining ~0.8% (and macOS continuing to be poorly represented for obvious reasons) in April.
[0] https://www.idc.com/resource-center/press-releases/1q26-pc-t...
> Those production numbers for the Neo are global and from unnamed supply chain sources.
Good point. Fixed.
> Linux is hardly a blip and even the Steam survey #s back that up
The IDC link doesn't provide Linux numbers. These links [1][2] do; [2] backs up the numbers you're quoting. The trouble is how to interpret them in context - are the 1% changes per OS on a monthly basis even statistically significant?
The statcounter numbers show desktop share for linux as 5.2% in December, 2.8% in February, 3.1% in March, 2.63% in April. Chrome OS as 4.3%, OS X as 15%, macOS as 8.8%. There's an interesting huge peak for OS X in Oct 2025, Linux in Dec 2025, macOS in Jan '26, with 'unknown' showing a continuous rise to 9.4% in April. Even Windows is showing monthly variations with 58% at the lowest and 65% at peak.
I don't know what to make of those numbers. And how do you separate that from the ebbs and flows to Steam and Statcounter properties?
I think one can make a case for 7 million Linux users in the US, with 18 million if including Chrome OS. Now throw in say 50% of the Neo worldwide buyers, so say 2.5 million (to grow to 5 million at new production levels), and the analysis holds up. What's even more important is the trend - and that seems to be on the upswing, and may not be showing up in these measurements quite yet. And I'm sure MS has internal dashboards showing windows users in some detail.
Linux users are notoriously hard to measure. macOS users are not broken out by country. So that leaves us reading the tea leaves, so to speak, based on sales numbers and estimates on the US breakdown.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
The Linux numbers went up because Valve did a better job of cleaning the results from the skewed Chinese data.
For what it's worth, Framework sells more of its new Pro line with Ubuntu than with Windows.
Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide. All the other numbers focus on the US only. That alone makes the threat at the OS level evaporate. Lenovo reportedly sells around 50 million units per year, Dell is at 25 million. 5 to 10 million units is tiny.
> Your first point seems flawed: Apple production numbers are to supply markets worldwide.
That's a good point. Still, assuming 50% US sales since US purchasing power is still relatively higher and Apple penetration in RoW is lower, it's not an order-of-magnitude difference, so the analysis is still useful. An additional indicator is that MS themselves are taking high-level executive action, so they're worried about something.
So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff.
Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.
Losing market share to ChromeOS and Apple has to be the most significant and obvious hit. The Steam Deck and second generation Steam Machines are also likely to nibble away at the edges.
I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.
If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.
> What sort of metric would I have registered as?
Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.
Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.
A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?
Yes for sure. My point is they won't know if I moved to Mac, Linux or just a Chromebook, or just decided to stop using a desktop PC.
They'll notice if no Windows machines phone home from your IP address anymore. It doesn't matter so much what you switched to, more that you're no longer giving Microsoft those sweet, sweet KPIs
Considering Win11 being, well, Win11, I wouldn't be surprised if they were sending partition tables of hard drives to detect other OSes.
They won't be able to detect which Linux distro it is that way, but they'd definitely know it's ext4 or whatnot, which heavily implies Linux.