Nadella: Four in five enterprise customers piloting Windows 10

Windows 10 adoption occurring at twice the rate experienced by Windows 7, Microsoft CEO claims as Q3 results disappoint

More than four out of five Microsoft enterprise customers are piloting Windows 10, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said as he claimed adoption of the operating system is double that of Window 7 at the same point.

Microsoft's share price belly-flopped five per cent last night as it revealed sales for the three months to 31 March rose just two per cent year on year to $22.1bn (£15.4bn) and profits missed Wall Street estimates.

Although there were some bright spots - including Azure and Surface - sales growth at each of its three operating units came in at a crawl.

Productivity and Business Processes, which includes Office software, and More Personal Computing both grew sales one per cent, to $6.5bn and $9.5bn respectively.

The latter's sales ledger was not helped by a 46 per cent constant-currency fall in Windows Phone revenues, although to compensate somewhat the Surface enjoyed its second consecutive $1bn quarter, with constant-currency sales up 61 per cent.

Intelligent Cloud revenue inched up three per cent to $6.1bn thanks to a 120 per cent hike in Azure sales.

"With our results this quarter, it remains clear we are one of the two leaders in this market," Nadella said on a Q3 conference call.

Last week, Gartner blamed falling sales of commercial PCs in EMEA on the fact that business buyers are evaluating Windows 10 and delaying major deployments until the end of 2016.

Nadella claimed Windows 10's productivity, security and device management capabilities are a hit with business users, adding that 83 per cent of enterprise customers are in active pilots today.

"We believe enterprise deployments will continue to drive up the over 270 million monthly active devices running Windows 10. The number of Windows 10 devices is twice that of Windows 7 over the same time period since launch," he said on the call, a transcript of which can be read here.

New features such as Windows Hello biometric security and deeper integration with Cortana that will arrive in the summer via a Windows 10 anniversary update will give laggards a nudge to upgrade, Nadella claimed.

He labelled the overall results "solid".