Here’s an interesting item. The venerable Notepad plain text editor has moved out of the basic install image for Windows. In fact, Notepad makes Microsoft Store debut as an app, from whence it can be updated easily and more frequently. The lead-in graphic shows the Store entry for Notepad (left) and its About window (right).

The full text description for Notepad in Store reads:

Notepad has been the fast and simple text editor on Windows for over 30 years, and now it’s available in the Microsoft Store! View, edit and search through plain text documents and source code files instantly.

If Notepad Makes Microsoft Store Debut, Then What?

The requirements section in the app says users must be running Windows version 19541.0 or higher. Current versions of 20H2 or Release Preview/Beta Channel run Builds 19042 and 19043, respectively, so they don’t qualify. But Dev Channel certainly does: that’s where I generated the foregoing screenshots.

19541 emerged on January 20, 2020 (nearly 16 months ago). I don’t remember seeing Notepad in the Store earlier, or hearing about its distribution through that app channel. In fact, I learned about it in a Windows Latest story dated May 16, 2021. That makes me wonder if the Store-based version has been on internal beta until 21382.1 hit last Friday — a typical MS release practice — and is just now making its way into Insider Preview Dev Channel releases. Such would be my guess.

Looking through update history in the Store, I don’t see any updates to Notepad in there just yet. That said, the “All Owned” apps list in the Store itself says that Notepad was last modified on 4/3/2021, which puts it into Build 21343 at the time (Flight Hub). Indeed, that could mean it made its way to the store on or before April 3. Because I didn’t notice and can’t find earlier reports about Notepad in the Store, I just can’t say for sure.

And boy, isn’t that just the way things go sometimes, here in Windows-World? Whenever it showed up in the Store, it’s good news for those who use Notepad and want quick access to new features, fixes and so forth.

It’s heeeeeeeere! The Dell Optiplex 7080, with its 10th-generation i7 CPU, popped up with News & Interests (N&I) in the notification area. This followed after updating to KB5001030. I’d read this was underway. But I now have personal, tangible evidence that the N&I rollout hits production PCs. Now the question becomes: how long will the rollout take to get to other, older PCs?

I See That N&I Rollout Hits Production PCs

You can see it, too, in the lead-in graphic for this story. It shows the Winver.exe  window just above the notification area, including the “weather bug” for N&I. So far, this is the only 19042 or 19043 PC (I have 5 of them altogether) on which N&I has made an appearance.

As you can read in this Windows Latest story, the rollout is underway. But I can tell you from personal observation that it’s hit fewer rather than more of its potential targets at the moment. Here’s how the afore-linked story explains things:

Unfortunately, the feature isn’t available yet for all users, according to several user reports. It looks like a wider rollout is not expected until the end of the month.

That story also concludes with the following statements:

News and Interests feed will be enabled automatically with a server-side update. More users are expected to receive the feature on May 11, while others will get it by the end of the month or in June.

I’m inclined to go along with this, though I do find myself wondering where and how they come up with this information. There hasn’t been much discussion about how rollouts work from MS itself, except to say that it starts out with a smaller population of PCs, and gradually extends its coverage to includes a larger population over time. Seems like the veracity of the timing will be demonstrated in the next 7 to 8 weeks. We’ll see!

Today, April 27, MS held its quarterly earnings call for Q3’FY2021. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports that among the many items the company shared was a disclosure that 1.3 billion active devices run Windows 10. Yes, that’s “Billion,” with a B.  To the best of my knowledge that makes Windows 10 the most widely used PC software of any kind. Last year, MS trumpeted it out that Windows 10 had cracked the 1B mark in March. 13 months later, that number has grown 30%.

If 1.3 Billion Active Devices Run Windows 10, Then What?

MS is careful to identify active devices, because it can count how many copies of Windows 10 are checking in for updates and such. As somebody in a household with 3 people and 10 PCs (all running some version of Windows 10) I can understand why they use that terminology.

I have two things to say about 1.3 B active devices:

1. That’s a lot of devices, and a pretty big installed based for MS to support and maintain.
2. Statista puts the global number of Android users at 1.6 B as of 2019, and claims 3.5 B smartphone users as of 2020. I’m guessing there could be over 2 B Android users worldwide now with the number of android devices higher than that. There are about 3 Android users for every iOS user, so that total population is probably around 2.67 B.

The Windows 10 user/device population looks like a monster (and probably is). But it’s not as big a monster as smartphone OS population, which currently outnumbers it at least 2-to-1. That ratio is bound to keep expanding in the smartphone’s favor, because so many people in the third world are getting those devices (and may never, ever own a PC of any kind).

From Small Things, Big Things Can Come

From the perspective of the Microsoft Cloud, and  Cloud PC’s ability to use smartphones as “thin clients” for virtual PCs in the cloud, this all looks absolutely fascinating. It’s no wonder that MS is working to bring Azure everywhere, and ready to let smartphone users remote into more capable, data-enriched and powerful apps and services from “the small screen.”

This should make the next few years extremely interesting, especially as it regards the future evolution and expanded use of (remote) Windows. Stay tuned: I’ll keep you apprised of what’s going on…