Is Windows 7 the fastest selling OS in history?

A Microsoft marketing boss has called Windows 7 the fast selling operating system by history. While there are no firm figures, Craig Beilinson pointed to impressive PC sales levels in the past few months.

Beilinson, who is director of marketing in Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, said Windows 7 is the fast selling system “by far”. However, he didn’t provide any sales figures for the system.

Instead Beilinson noted a range of PC sales increases including:

• a near 50 percent rise in the week of Windows 7′s release compared with the week before;
• a 63 percent rise on Black Friday compared with the same day in 2008; and
• a more than 50 percent year-on-year rise across the holiday shopping season.

Now, while it’s perfectly possible those extra sales were to people wanting to downgrade immediately to XP or to people intending to wipe the drive and install Linux, it does seem safe to conclude the rise is down to interest in Windows 7.

What those figures don’t tell us is how many consumers have bought upgrades for existing machines, or how many businesses have licensed the system. Without those details, it’s hard to tell how Windows 7 is doing overall.

It’s also worth remembering that all other things being equal, Windows 7 should have got off to a better start than Vista simply because its consumer release came in October as opposed to January. People are much more likely to be buying brand new machines in the run-up to Christmas rather than the month after it.

If you then go back to XP, Windows 7 should also be selling better given that far more people have an interest in buying computers now than in 2001, or are willing to buy a second machine for the same home.

So is Windows 7 the fastest selling system in history? We have to take Microsoft’s word for it, but it’s certainly believable. But without the exact sales figures there’s no way to be certain whether the system is doing any better or worse than would be expected.

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• Windows 7 at end of year one – fastest selling OS ever with 240 million licenses
• Windows 7 fastest selling OS of all time
• Microsoft selling 7 Windows 7 licenses every second – 150 million sold in total
• Windows 7 beats Vista in first week sales by 234% – Windows PCs also up 49%
• Microsoft marketing sees Windows PCs destroy Apple Macs