When Microsoft reported its Q2 earnings yesterday, it had some big news: Windows 7 has sold over 300 million licenses since its public release in October 2009. In October 2010 at the operating system’s first birthday, this number was only 240 million – that’s quite an impressive figure.
These sales, along with the success of the Kinect motion sensor, earned Microsoft $19.95 billion for the quarter that finished at the end of December.
Along with this announcement came the standard boilerplate that Microsoft copies and pastes every time they talk about Windows 7 sales figures. Says Microsoft COO Kevin Turner:
“Windows 7 continues to be the fastest-growing operating system in history, and our recent System on a Chip announcement demonstrates our commitment that Windows will have the power and flexibility to run everywhere and on every device.”
Things are looking good for Windows 7 right now. As we’ve reported, it runs on over 20% of the world’s computers, and is even gaining a foothold in the businesses and enterprises that spurned Windows Vista and clung to XP. The first service pack, due out at some unspecified date in the next couple of months, won’t add much by way of major new features but it will generally improve the stability and security of the OS, and should help Windows adoption pick up in those businesses that still wait for the first service pack before deploying anything.
Still, Windows 7 has a major shortcoming: at the moment, it’s basically a non-player in the burgeoning and lucrative tablet market, which is dominated by Apple’s iPad and a mile-long list of forthcoming Android tablets. The “System on a Chip” announcement mentioned above won’t have any impact until Windows 8‘s eventual release in 2012 or 2013, and until then it seems that Windows’ biggest successes will be confined to traditional desktop and laptop computers.
Still, 300 million licenses is a massive achievement, and Windows 7 remains a great and competitive desktop operating system more than a year after its release – Microsoft deserves some congratulation for its success. If the company can execute Windows 8 as well as it has executed Windows 7, I may just have to eat every word I’ve ever written about Windows on tablets.
Related posts:
- 150 Million Windows 7 Licenses Sold – 7 Copies A Second
- Microsoft Expects to Ship 300 Million Copies of Windows 7 in 2010
- Microsoft ships 90 Million Windows 7 copies
- Details Of Windows 7 SP1 Start To Emerge
- Microsoft Selling More Than 7 Copies Of Windows 7 A Second
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