Windows 7 at end of year one – fastest selling OS ever with 240 million licenses
Windows 7 is now a year old, having launched at retail on Oct. 22, 2009. And with 240 million Windows 7 licenses sold, Windows 7 is now the fastest selling operating system of all time.
This time last year we were all expectantly waiting for Windows 7 to drop at retail. We were also wondering whether Windows 7 was going to live up to the hype and banish all those bad memories of the launch of Vista three years previously. All the indications were that this was going to be the case, with the beta releases performing great and being received well by people on all sides of the OS spectrum. But there was still that germ of doubt lingering.
In the end we needn’t have worried, as Microsoft launched Windows 7 with very few issues coming to light. Sales were immediately impressive, as people were keen to upgrade from both the disappointing Vista and the aging XP. And the numbers have continued to climb ever since.
Microsoft has announced that 240 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold in the 12 months since launch. This means it’s the fastest selling operating system of all time by quite a margin.
Just six months after launch, all Microsoft OEM partners were selling Windows 7 PCs, compared to 70 percent for Vista in the same time period after its launch. An incredible 93 percent of all new consumer PCs now run on Windows 7.
There is still some way to go before Windows 7 is the king of operating systems, as Windows XP is still the most-used OS in the world. However, it’s not unimpressive that Windows 7 has managed to hit 17 percent in just a year, forging past the 13 percent of Vista on its way.
Windows 7 is a huge success, that much is clear. And I suspect the impressive sales will continue as more businesses make the switch to Microsoft’s latest and possibly greatest operating system. The one problem area is with tablets, as Windows 7 doesn’t seem able to cope with the demands of this emerging form factor. So, roll on Windows 8, I guess.
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October 22nd, 2010
Win7 after 1 year is a fail. Only 17% which means that the majority of Vista users didn’t switch and so did the XP users ( 75% in Enterprise still use XP). Adding that all new PCs come installed with Win7 , the OS should have had 50% market share by now.
October 22nd, 2010
I liken the XP/7 situation to that of NT4/WS03 on the server side. The ramifications for this change are huge to large organizations. You could argue it is bigger than the server situation because of the scale – an enterprise with a large datacenter might have a few thousand servers, but hundreds of thousands of PCs. The move cannot be taken lightly and it cannot be made overnight. Windows 7 is better than any previous OS and hopefully it will get everyone on a trajectory to make easier OS migrations in the future.
October 22nd, 2010
One year in Windows 7 has proven to be a massive success by any measure – and it’s really just beginning. Deployment and adoption in business will start gaining momentum over the next 18 months as the majority of business users finally move toward the next generation of computing.