Bekker's Blog

Blog archive

Windows Vista License Sales Top 180 Million

We were scratching our heads during Corporate Vice President Brad Brooks' speech at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this month. For all Brooks' talk about Microsoft drawing a "line in the sand" for critics of Vista to cross, there were no fruits of the new $300 million ad campaign on display and no hard data about Vista adoption.

Microsoft addressed part of that with a hard figure on Vista during its quarterly earnings call last week. The news: Sales of Vista licenses have exceeded 180 million licenses.

On its face, that's a really good number. For a quick recap, Microsoft announced 20 million units sold in the first month (March 26, 2007), 40 million units sold in the first 100 days (May 15, 2007), more than 60 million licenses sold "as of the summer" of 2007 (Sept. 27, 2007) and 100 million licenses sold in its first year (Jan. 30, 2008). So we're talking 80 million units in the first half of calendar 2008, compared with roughly 50 million in the first half of 2007.

Take away downgrade rights, and I'm not so sure the number is meaningful other than as a measure of Windows' market power in general. But there it is, duly reported.

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 2008 at 11:58 AM


Featured

  • Orgs Now Getting the New Outlook for Windows

    The new Outlook for Windows 11 app is now at the "general availability" release stage for personal users, but it's also "enterprise ready."

  • Four New Microsoft Surface Devices Unveiled at Event

    Four new Surface devices for businesses were announced during Microsoft's fall hardware event.

  • Cisco To Buy Splunk for $28B

    Cisco announced it is acquiring security and IT solutions provider Splunk for about "$28 billion in equity value."

  • Copilot for Windows 11 Available September 26

    Microsoft Also announced new Copilot features coming to Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365.