Whether you’re a Microsoft user or not, you have to respect the fact that its install base for operating systems is massive. The company spans plenty of sectors, specifically enterprise, but of course in the home, too.
Today, the company announced that its latest operating system, Windows 8, has sold 60 million licenses.
Finding out how many of these licenses are consumer and how many have been sold in bulk to vendors and enterprises would be a good thing. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Here’s what the Windows blog team did say about the milestone:
At the 11th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech Forum at CES 2013 today, Windows Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller announced that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date. This represents the cumulative sales of Windows 8 including both upgrades and sales to OEMs for new devices. This is a similar sales trajectory that we saw with Windows 7.
We have seen a significant increase in the number of Windows 8 certified systems since general availability at the end of October. There are now more than 1,700 certified systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT.
In addition the news of how many licenses have been sold, the team says that Microsoft is seeing “strong growth” in the developers building on top of the platform. The number of available apps has been quadrupled since launch. Also, Microsoft says that it has passed the 100M app download mark.
Windows 8 has only been available for two months, so Microsoft sees this as solid growth. In October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Windows 8 machines are “The best PCs ever” and that “The experience is truly magical.” I don’t know anything about that, but I will say that Microsoft has done a nice job of bringing all of its properties together in a unified look and feel, including Windows Phone and XBox.
UPDATE: We spoke to a Microsoft spokesperson and they told us “While we can’t share a specific breakdown, Windows 8 upgrades continue to outpace Windows 7 sales.”
[Photo credit: Flickr]
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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