Seven months into the Windows 7 life cycle, and Microsoft is once again banging the drum for it's popular new OS. The announcements below follow an appearance by corporate VP and CFO Tami Reller at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch US Technology Conference. She noted, among other things:
Microsoft has sold over 100 million Windows 7 licenses in its the first 6 months on the market. Microsoft says that this makes Windows 7 the fastest selling operating system in history. Note, however, that this is not new information, and no update on Windows 7 sales after seven months was provided. That said, in a very Apple-esque move, Microsoft adds that this figure means that 7 copies of Windows 7 were sold every second in its first six months on the market. (So, averaging the 100 million number over 6 months, Windows 7 thus outsold the iPad by over 15-to-1 in comparable release time periods. Just to put the "game changer" in perspective.)
According to Net Applications, over 12 percent of PCs worldwide are running Windows 7. That's over 3 times the market share of Mac OS X for those of you keeping score at home. And while I'm not sure how such things are measured, Net Applications a LifeHacker study from March noted that "people are very happy with Windows 7." Customer satisfaction for Windows 7 is at 94 percent.
According to Microsoft, businesses are starting to get moving on their Windows 7 deployment plans. This has resulted in a 14 percent increase in sales for business PCs. It's not clear what the time period for this increase is, or where the data comes from. I do know from my own discussions with PC makers and major Microsoft customers that businesses, in general, are far more enthusiastic about Windows 7 than they were about Vista and appear to be actively preparing deployments. However, these companies move slowly even when they are moving. This is space to watch.
According to Reller:
"40 percent of enterprises are in either evaluation or pilot of Windows 7. And if you add in all levels of evaluation going on, you get up to about three-quarters of enterprise customers that are active with Windows 7."
According to Forrester, Windows 7 will become the new standard for most commercial (business) PCs within 12 months.
Some other interesting data from Reller:
"There are about 400 million PCs in businesses out there, [out of] about a billion PCs globally across all segments, 400 million in businesses, and the average age of those PCs is four-and-a-half years old, and 85 percent of those PCs are running XP."
"We see the slate category as a real extension and a growth opportunity for the PC market, the device market broadly, and it's in its early stages. It has a lot of similarities to where the netbook category was early on, which is some specialized use initially, and then more mainstream use over time. And we do think that we have a real opportunity in particular because of the work that we've done to date, and in particular with Windows 7 on touch to really create some compelling slate experiences in close concert with our OEMs. Today, slates are predominantly being used for consumption, and we think that with the power of Windows 7 not only can we think about genuine full consumption of the Web, but also creating content, as well as productivity."
"[At Computex this week,] we talked about two offerings for slates. We talked about Windows 7 Home Premium, which brings all of the capabilities of Windows 7, including touch, including support for media consumption, productivity, everything you'd want to do on a Windows 7 Premium slate experience. And then we also talked about Windows Embedded Compact, and that is another offering that we have for OEMs, and in particular that can be ARM-based. There are two offerings for OEMs. And we did see a number of announcements from OEMs at Computex around those."
