Live Spaces: Did we see wrong stats?

This week, Microsoft announced the end of its blogging platform Windows Live Spaces. The approx. 30 million users can migrate their Spaces over to WordPress.com. MS-internal e-mails now might reveal that this figure is not showing the reality.
According to these internal messages, Microsoft expects only 1% of all these 30 million Spaces users to switch over to WordPress. The major part of the user base is inactive since a long time.
It is not uncommon for companies of any size to tune figures like this. For externals, there is no way to find out whether the statistics are indeed correct. However, this exaggeration had noticeable impact on the news publishing regarding the Microsoft-WordPress.com deal.
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Currently, WordPress.com is running some 14 million blogs. Some 30 million additional ones would not only mean that Automattic would have to extend its server capacities massively, but also make WordPress.com the market leader in blogging.
However, Microsoft’s mails dated to the 28 September, there are only some 300,000 active blogs at Windows Live Spaces. For WordPress, that’s only but a minimum increase — no new servers needed, it seems...
Interesting as well: Microsoft managers thought about whether it would be a good thing to lose too many clients to a Linux platform. In contrast to Windows Live Spaces running on Windows Server with IIS, WordPress is using nginx with PHP, on Linux.
A Microsoft employee declared he is hoping for WordPress to switch over to Microsoft’s cloud architecture Windows Azure. However, a spokesperson at Microsoft stated to Betanews.com:

There are approximately 30 million users on Windows Live Spaces that includes both authors and their visitors. About 7 million are authors — this means Spaces users, most of whom have a blog and regularly update their content. We expect a significant customer set will choose the great blogging experience offered by WordPress.com.