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Microsoft flogs 400 million Windows 7 licences
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Microsoft has proudly announced that it has sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses.
During Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, the firm's bombastic CEO Steve Ballmer told the friendly crowd that the firm sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses. It should be noted that 'licenses sold' in this case refers to both retail editions as well as OEMs and system builders, nevertheless the figure is an impressive one for the company.
Microsoft's Windows 7 figures stack up quite nicely. Last year the firm announced on the first anniversary of the Windows 7 launch that it had shifted 240 million licenses. That was back in October and with three months to go until the second anniversary, the sales figures look unlikely to match those of the first year, but there seems to be healthy demand for Microsoft's latest operating system.
As is usually the case with Microsoft, it failed to miss an opportunity to shout out figures, so along with the 400 million licenses it managed to flog, Microsoft claimed that 27.13 per cent of PCs worldwide run Windows 7. It also took a bit of time to point out, once again, that market share figures show that its Internet Explorer 9 web browser is now the "most popular modern browser" in the US.
Microsoft announcing sales and market share figures are par for the course, however there was nothing about Windows Phone 7 other than an admission from Ballmer that "we have gone from very small to very small". Even Ballmer couldn't harness his considerable abilities at media spin, and believe us we've experienced them first hand, to eek out anything that was positive about WP7.
There was also time for Microsoft to big up Windows 8 with the corporate VP and CFO of Windows and Windows Live, Tami Reller saying that Windows 7 is the path to Windows 8. Interestingly, Reller said that Microsoft foresees big businesses running both Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Following the disaster that was Windows Vista, Microsoft has to its credit produced a half decent operating system and has managed to flog a lot of licenses off the back of it. It'll be interesting to see if it can drum up similar demand for its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Given that Microsoft is already saying that it expects firms to use both Windows 7 and Windows 8, that seems unlikely. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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Every license sold, whether downgrade rights are exercised, goes down against Windows 7. There is every chance that a massive portion of those 400 million were actually XP installs. Really only the web browser stats can help identify who's actually using Windows 7 out there.
Versus new machines sold (which isn't a choice for consumers as they can't really buy other choices) how many of those are upgrades to existing installs? In my experience as a repair shop owner I'd have to say that upgrade percentage is very tiny, maybe even .5%. What I see are Win7 licenses on new machines and almost never an upgraded system. That really means that alternatives are still unable to compete a level field. Even consumers don't know that they have other choices still (besides Mac--and the Mac zealots generally turn most people off).
So, it's hardly news that 400 million copies of windows are distributed world-wide over a 2.5 year time-frame.
...this article totally flogs.