Friday, 14 February 2014

Windows 8.x reaches 200 million licenses sold

Microsoft marketing chief Tami Reller announced that the
company has sold 200 million Windows 8 licenses in the 15
or so months that it has been on the market.

This number includes only OEM and retail copies of the
operating system and excludes volume licenses. The company
previously announced that Windows 8 had reached 100
million copies sold in May of last year, a rate of sales that
matched Windows 7. That operating system, however,
reached 240 million sales within the first 12 months,
demonstrating that Windows 8 is clearly not selling as fast.

Still, in a PC market that's shrinking—and which started
shrinking even before the release of Windows 8—200 million
copies is perhaps not too shabby. PCs as a whole are not
selling as fast as they were during Windows 7's heyday, and
both Windows and Office are suffering as a result.

As is almost always the case with these numbers, this is a sell-
in figure rather than sell-through, which is to say that it
represents the number of licenses sold to OEMs and retailers
and not the number sold to actual end-users. It also doesn't
account for people using downgrade rights (when available).
These numbers never do.

Via: Ars Technica

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