Fresh Windows 10 code coming in from Microsoft. Windows 10 has been a massive success — in all possible terms. Its adoption rate and overall market share has been the fastest, even when compared to its ancestral siblings.

And while those adoption rates and market share expansion may have been fuelled by the free update availability of Windows 10, it still has helped Microsoft a long way, in re-affirming its dominance as the biggest player in desktop OS market.

To further corroborate those numbers, Microsoft, along with dropping a new build (which we’ll discuss in a while), has also published some fresh Windows store numbers for us to have a go through.

windows-10-adoption-graph-2    windows-10-adoption-graph-1
For starts, Microsoft says that Windows 10, released July 29 and currently available for Windows PCs and tablets, now accounts for more than 50% of all Windows Store downloads. The company further says, that while Windows 8.1 has been the most popular OS for both Windows and Windows Phone for the past year, Windows 10 is quickly establishing its presence in Windows Store traffic on PC and tablet (the green slice on the Windows chart).

Further in stats, comes Windows Store visits. Microsoft says, that Windows 10 users have made a staggering 1.25 billion visits to the Windows Store, and they account for more than half of the Windows Store downloads. For developers, Windows 10 has translated into 2X the user engagement and 4X the revenue per user compared to Windows 8.x.

Build 10565

Along with releasing those stats, Microsoft today also rolled out a fresh Windows 10 build — build 10565. Apart from general bug fixes and regular improvements, the most notable update brought in by this build includes Skype Integrations and improvements to Cortana and Edge.

Lets get to Skype first.

As promised by Microsoft earlier, Skype messaging, calling and video capabilities will come integrated into Windows 10 through the Messaging, Phone and Skype video universal Windows apps. With this build, you can preview the integrated capabilities on your PC while an upcoming Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview build will have these integrated capabilities for you to preview soon on mobile devices.

Microsoft’s revival browser Edge, is also getting some shiny new features. While the browser has alsready come out on top when it comes to overall browser speed and lesser memory consumption, Edge is now also getting a “Tab preview” feature.

As the name suggests, the new feature will now let you preview all tabs opened up on your Edge browser window.

Developers in the fast ring, who’ll be getting this build first, will also be looking at the new syncing feature in Microsoft Edge that lets you sync your Favorites and Reading list items. Microsoft has however said, that refinement to this feature are underway and bugs are to be expected.

Much needed added functionalities are coming to Cortana as well. Cortana is able to intelligently understand your inked notes – setting reminders based on locations, times and numbers that she can understand from your digital annotations.

Coming back to Microsoft’s overall performance with Windows 10. It has been great, seriously. The company had a better-than-expected hardware event with no flop shows as of now, all of its newly launched devices have received favourable reviews, and Windows 10 — well, it finally did not suffer the fate of Windows Vista or 8 or those other versions for that matter.

However, Microsoft has still been rather reluctant in detailing out exact numbers. While the company has been talking in terms of relational numbers (this % of that etc…), it’d be better if MS could roll out more specific numbers, to give a clearer picture of how Windows 10 and its Store are actually faring. Listening Gabe ?


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