Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

Windows 10 now on 200 million devices worldwide

Published Jan 4th, 2016 6:20PM EST

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

Despite some concerns about bugs and even privacy, Windows 10 is proving a huge hit.

The company has announced that 200 million monthly active devices around the world are running Windows 10 and the pace is accelerating. More than 40 percent of new Windows 10 devices have become active since Black Friday and Windows 10 is growing faster than any version of Windows – outpacing Windows 7 by nearly 140 percent and Windows 8 by nearly 400 percent.

Related: Windows 10 bugs emerge

The tech giant’s goal is to get Windows 10 running on 1 billion devices in the next few years.

“We’re seeing increased preference for Windows 10 with consumers. Since Black Friday, US retail PC share for Windows 10 grew 16 points to 62 percent compared to the prior four weeks,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a blog post Monday.

“We are also seeing accelerating and unprecedented demand for Windows 10 among enterprise and education customers,” he wrote. “As of today, more than 76 percent of our enterprise customers are in active pilots of Windows 10, and we now have over 22 million devices running Windows 10 across enterprise and education customers.”

Related: Stop Windows 10 spying dead in its tracks with one free app

The company also claims that consumers are happier with Windows 10, noting that people have spent over 11 billion hours on Windows 10 in December alone, “spending more time on Windows than ever before.”

The growing numbers is good news for the company’s efforts to take a bite out of Apple market share.

Related: 3 Windows 10 privacy dangers to fix now

Windows 10 accounted for 7.9 percent percent of the desktop market in October 2015, according to research published by Netmarketshare.com. While that’s still far short of Windows 7’s 55.7 percent market share, it’s closing in on Windows 8.1’s 10.68 percent. Among the multiple iterations of Mac OS X, versions 10.1 and 10.11 are the most widely deployed, according to Netmarketshare.com, accounting for 3.45 percent and 2.18 percent of the desktop market, respectively.

More from FoxNews.com Tech: