Microsoft: 300 million licenses of Windows 7 sold in 15 months

Emil

Posts: 152   +0

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 has sold more than 300 million licenses so far, meaning it is still the fastest-selling operating system. Windows 7 has been available to the masses for 15 months.

"To put that in perspective, 300 million is roughly the combined number of households in North American and in Europe," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Or, to put it another way, if you lined up 300 million Windows 7 product boxes, they would stretch nearly 1.5 times around the Earth! As of today, over 20% of Internet-connected PCs worldwide are running Windows 7 according to Net Applications."

Windows 7 actually grabbed 20 percent of the market at the end of 2010. Between January and December 2010, Windows XP fell almost 10 percentage points to 56.72 percent market share, Windows Vista lost over five percentage points to 12.11 percent, and Windows 7 gained over 13 percentage points, pushing it to 20.87 percent.

Three months after release, Microsoft said more than 60 million Windows 7 licenses were sold. Doing some simple math, it appears that sales still haven't slowed down.

If you're already on Windows 7, you should check out our guides for Microsoft's latest operating system. If you haven't upgraded to it yet, tell us why in the comments below.

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@home moved on W7 on August, 2009
@work - just in the start of the year (got 'lucky' that one of my hard drives from the RAID0 just died)
the other colleges arent that lucky :D

so far, im really happy with W7 and im not surprised with the success of the os

to ppl that still running XP or (even) Vista - move, move, move....
 
i bot Win7 pro the moment i saw students can get it for 30 US moneys.

i was surprised to read that Vista only lost around 5 points. i would think that ppl would replace that ASAP. the upgrade is not cheap for most. i bet thats why
 
Well, that's a dent towards the 500 million pirated copies that are being used in China and Eastern Europe. ;)
 
TomSEA said:
Well, that's a dent towards the 500 million pirated copies that are being used in China and Eastern Europe. ;)

Dude, pirate is not the preferred nomenclature. "Non paying customer", please.
 
At some point many of the corporations that have been camping out on XP will be making the move to Windows7, so this number is likely to grow.
 
LOL @ Gwailo247. ;-)

Mizzou - exactly. My company is making the move to Windows 7 and Office 10 in the next 3 months.
 
TomSEA said:
Well, that's a dent towards the 500 million pirated copies that are being used in China and Eastern Europe. ;)
[+]
its strange, im with you on that
 
motrin said:
i bot Win7 pro the moment i saw students can get it for 30 US moneys.

i was surprised to read that Vista only lost around 5 points. i would think that ppl would replace that ASAP. the upgrade is not cheap for most. i bet thats why

I'm sure a lot of users aren't even aware they can upgrade an OS, and assume what comes installed on the PC from Best Buy is what it'll have forever.
 
I'm saving up and will be building a new system to replace my trusty and ever rock stable socket 939 system. I see no reason to upgrade to 7 on my current system. But once my new build occurs you can bet I'll be moving to Windows 7 64.

My wife's new laptop came with Windows 7 64 and I installed Office 2010. 7 is very nice.
 
Route44 said:
I'm saving up and will be building a new system to replace my trusty and ever rock stable socket 939 system. I see no reason to upgrade to 7 on my current system. But once my new build occurs you can bet I'll be moving to Windows 7 64.

My wife's new laptop came with Windows 7 64 and I installed Office 2010. 7 is very nice.

I don't know when you're planning on building this system, but if you put it off long enough, maybe you should just wait for Win 8 :p
 
I don't know when you're planning on building this system, but if you put it off long enough, maybe you should just wait for Win 8 :p


This year. As far as I can tell from reading which are definitely guesses on anybody's part at this point that 2013 will be the earliest. I wish we all knew just how "different" this OS will be from what we have had for these many years.
 
Windows 7 is the best OS, however windows XP is still the fastest in gaming in my opinion, so i fav xp over win7 , which is why i will continue to use xp .
 
Win 7 FTW!

My company with 30k+ employees switched 5 months ago. Lots of small improvements that increase overall productivity.
 
TomSEA said:
Well, that's a dent towards the 500 million pirated copies that are being used in China and Eastern Europe. ;)

but but but that's potential sales profits, so that means Microsoft lost like 50000 billion gajillion dollars. Microsoft needs to sue China.
 
but but but that's potential sales profits, so that means Microsoft lost like 50000 billion gajillion dollars. Microsoft needs to sue China.
I'm pretty sure the principle of sovereign immunity kicks, in when a penny ante monopoly like M$ tries to sue a honkin' big monopoly like China. And one must consider that China possesses nuclear weapons.

Besides, just think of the paperwork involved, when you have 500,000,000 names in the caption of "the above titled action". And then there's the issue of serving 500,000,000 subpoenas.
 
No surprise that Windows 7 (6.1) has become such a success, considering it's predecessor(s). However, even though I'm running Windows 7 on my laptop, there are currently a lot of PC's in the office running no less than 5 alternative OS's.

Most of them runs Windows XP Pro because of its backwards-compatibility. In the office, we use some Windows 3.11-applications that are vital to our business and are not available anymore on the market. That, or they are simply non-grata on modern machines, thus we still need to use XP's. The media-PC runs Windows XP MCE 2005. The average-PC's runs Linux Ubuntu 10, the prototype firewall-PC runs Windows 98SE, and the test-board PC runs Windows Vista, after being degraded since nobody wanted to use it as a regular PC :D .

Although, we skipped Vista due to its reputation (we quickly confirmed all of those in our office, in about 1 hour) the mobile-units (the laptops) runs Windows 7.
 
Windows 7 is just like Vista. Tons of features removed and broken. Poor usability. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_Vista. Unnecessary GUI changes. It would be much more intelligent (and probably much harder to do) innovation to improve Windows without changing the GUI. But changing the cosmetics has mainly one purpose: to conceal, that nothing really new happened.
 
To the guess who replied on 1/30 at 11:00 AM - YOU must be still running XP! What a joke. Keep telling yourseft you're making the right choice!
 
Yes I am back to XP after trying Windows 7 for several months. It has the same issues as Vista. Bloated, runs great initially then performance degrades over a period of time, updates take ages to install, removes tons of features, moves everything around to make users think things have improved and changed and the search, Start menu, taskbar and file explorer suck so bad it's impossible to get things done.
 
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