Microsoft yesterday issued a new Windows 10 preview to its Insider testers, making good — at least in one instance — on a December promise to quicken the pace of its beta releases.

Build 11102 of Windows 10 was delivered Thursday to Insider participants on the “Fast” ring release track. The new build followed its predecessor by just eight days.

The eight-day interval was significantly shorter than the averages in both the first and second halves of 2015, according to Computerworld’s records. In the first six months of last year, the average stretch between Insider builds was 27 days, or nearly a month. During the second half of 2015, Microsoft reduced that average to 17 days.
Continue reading After many promises, Microsoft accelerates Windows 10 preview delivery →

Come the beginning of 2016, Microsoft will get much more assertive in distributing Windows 10 upgrades to consumers and small businesses, the company’s top OS executive said Thursday.

Rather than wait for customers running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to request a copy of the new OS — the practice since June — Microsoft will instead begin to automatically send the upgrade to PCs via Windows Update, the default security maintenance service.

The push — which some will see as too pushy by far — will be a two-step process, with the first kicking in this year, the second in early 2016.

“We will soon be publishing Windows 10 as an ‘Optional Update’ in Windows Update for all Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers,” said Terry Myerson, who leads the Windows and devices group at Microsoft, in a post to a company blog. “Adding Windows 10 here is another way we will make it easy for you to find your upgrade.”
Continue reading Microsoft to get pushy about upgrading to Windows 10 →

Windows 10’s user share growth slowed significantly in September, but by the month’s end approximately 110 million customers were running the new OS, data released today signaled.

According to U.S. analytics company Net Applications, Windows 10’s user share — a measure of the fraction of unique users who ran the OS when they went online — grew 1.4 percentage points in September to 6.6%. Continue reading Windows 10 growth slows, but breaks 100M device mark. →

Microsoft yesterday said it had struck a deal with China’s Baidu, best known to Westerners as the country’s largest search provider, to push Windows 10 to China’s massive consumer market.

For its part, Baidu will use its own distribution channel, including an application labeled “Windows 10 Express,” to offer consumers the official Windows 10 upgrade download. Also, Baidu has committed to crafting “universal” Windows apps — those that run on all forms of Windows 10, albeit after some tweaking to finesse the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile — for search, video, maps and online storage. Of the latter, Baidu offers 2TB of free cloud storage space, double what Microsoft gives its best customers, consumers who subscribe to Office 365.
Continue reading Microsoft strikes deal with China’s Baidu, gets a chance to upgrade more than half a billion PCs to Windows 10. →