Windows 10 Preview: Microsoft Corporation Has Given Away 1M Free Downloads, It Says

Over 1 million people have registered for the Windows 10 technical preview, a free download Microsoft Corp. began offering computer experts earlier this month. The tech giant has also gotten over 200,000 bits of feedback on how to improve the Windows 10 preview, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft vice president and head of operating systems, said in a blog post on Monday.

Microsoft knows it needs to improve on its admittedly lackluster release of Windows 8, so much so that it has forgone using 9 in its naming scheme. Belfiore said that Microsoft will share more detailed plans earlier than it has in the past, as the company wants “to build a Windows that everyone will love and really enjoy using.”

Windows 10 users are able to submit feedback through an app inside of the technical preview, with most of their concerns being over how the OS looks. Perhaps that explains why Windows 8 was so poorly received.

Windows 10 users are reportedly using a lot of apps, a metric that could mean that its going to be more popular. Roughly 68 percent of users ran more than seven different apps every day, Belfiore said, with some using the operating system even more heavily. “We have seen about 25 percent of devices running the Windows 10 technical preview launching more than 26 apps per day, and 5 percent launching a whopping 68 apps per day!” he said.

Most of the users installing the Windows 10 technical preview were running it on a PC, as opposed to installing the early beta sandboxed inside of a virtual machine, or VM. “Thirty-six percent of installations of the Windows 10 technical preview are in VMs,” Belfiore said, which makes Microsoft “confident that a lot of the feedback is based on ‘medium-term’ use and not just a few minutes of experimentation.”

Microsoft also has a new forum for people who want to submit suggestions and ideas for Windows 10 but aren’t daring enough to install the free preview. Microsoft has said that it will release a consumer version of Windows 10 at an undisclosed date in 2015, and the company has said it will eventually port a version of the new OS to the Xbox One gaming console.

"Windows 10 is not going to be an incremental step from Windows 8.1," Tony Prophet, Microsoft's new vice president of Windows marketing, said yesterday, according to Business Insider. "Windows 10 is going to be a material step. We're trying to create one platform, one ecosystem that unites as many of the devices from the small embedded Internet of Things, through tablets, through phones, through PCs and, ultimately, into the Xbox."