More than 100 million copies of Windows 8 have been sold in its first six months on the market, according to a Q&A with Windows division Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller.
The post confirms that the Windows Blue update will become available later in the year. Among other things, this serves as an opportunity for Microsoft to "respond to the customer feedback" that the company has no doubt been inundated with since Windows 8 was released.
The Windows 8 license count wasn't the only number mentioned. The company claims that the number of apps in the Windows Store has increased by six times since launch. There have been 250 million app downloads, and about 90 percent of all apps get downloaded each month.
Microsoft's cloud services are also picking up users, with a claimed 250 million SkyDrive users, 400 million active Outlook.com users, and 700 million active Microsoft Accounts. The transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com recently completed, with all users now using the new e-mail platform several weeks ahead of schedule.
This is the third time that Microsoft has talked about how many units Windows 8 has shifted. Forty million copies were sold in the first month, rising to 60 million a month later. The sales rate has certainly slowed since then, with just 40 million copies sold in the last four months. This is not in itself unusual; past operating systems have seen an initial surge of sales before leveling off.
Good? Bad? Microsoft's detractors will inevitably point out that Windows 7 picked up market share at a quicker rate, and thus Windows 8 is a failure. The company's supporters will point out in turn that Windows 8 is primarily a consumer play, and that businesses are still in the process of migrating from the 11 and a half year old Windows XP to Windows 7. Such slow-moving companies are hardly likely to let the release of a new operating system disrupt their transition plans.
Microsoft, for its part, is acting upbeat about the numbers, emphasizing that Windows 8 represents a big change and explaining that big changes take time. Reller also said that the PC is "very much alive," and that it's now part of a broader market of tablets as well as (traditional) PCs.
The 100 million figure does suggest that the PC isn't quite dead yet. A rate of 10 million copies per month isn't too shabby. The iPad, which according to its proponents is going to bring about the end of the PC (and hence the end of Windows), sold 6.5 million units a month last quarter. By most metrics, that's lower than the number of Windows 8 licenses sold.
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