Microsoft: Windows 8 Consumer Preview Downloaded 1 Million Times In One Day

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Thursday, March 1st, 2012
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Microsoft’s official Win8 Twitter feed has confirmed the inevitable: Win8′s Consumer Preview, a beta version of the new operating system, was downloaded 1 million times since launch. To put this into perspective, Microsoft sold seven copies of the software a second in 2010, and, yesterday, gave away 11 copies a second.

We’re pretty bullish on the new operating system and, barring some considerable hurdles for folks used to the desktop paradigm, this looks like Microsoft’s big gamble. Considering, also, that Microsoft served up a full petabyte of data without crashing, the download process itself was quite a feat.