Microsoft celebrated the feat of one billion active Windows 10 devices, a feat it expected to achieve two years ago. But is it better late than never?

This was always going to happen-the only question was when exactly Microsoft would achieve its goal. Terry Myerson, Microsoft's former vice president, confidently predicted at the Build 2015 conference that Windows 10 would reach one billion active devices in "two to three years." Therefore, Microsoft's initial thought was to reach this goal by July 2018 at the latest.

Windows 10 was launched in July 2015, a few months after Build 2015. To get things rolling, Microsoft promoted free upgrades for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 users for the first year. As a result, there was an initial flood of upgrades to Windows 10, but as things settled down, it became clear that it would take longer than expected for the number of active installations to reach 1 billion.

After all, it would take exactly two to three years. This number includes a variety of devices, including desktop and laptop PCs, Xbox One consoles, HoloLens devices running Windows 10, and IoT devices.

"Windows 10 is not only the most popular PC gaming platform on the planet, it's also on the entire Xbox family of consoles, including the fastest and most powerful Xbox Series X, launching later this year," Microsoft says.

One reason it took a little longer than expected is that Windows 7 has been so powerful for so long. When general support for Windows 7 ended a few months ago, Windows 7 was still installed on hundreds of millions of PCs.

Interestingly, according to Microsoft, all Fortune 500 companies are using Windows 10 devices. Still, it is an interesting statistic.

"As companies move from Windows 7 to Windows 10, we are committed to positioning them to run their businesses more efficiently and more securely and to deliver better products, services, and solutions to their customers," Microsoft says.

Microsoft is trying to push another major update to Windows 10 (20H1). Of interest to gamers is that the upcoming update will add a GPU temperature monitor to Task Manager and a frames per second counter to the Xbox game bar.