Microsoft announced late last week that it has sold over 200 million Windows 8 licenses. Vice President of Marketing, Tami Reller, made this remark during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference.
The 200 million licenses do not include volume license sales, but the number does include sales to the public as well as those to OEMs. Sales are a little on the disappointing side when compared to those of Windows 7. While Windows 8 has taken almost 15 months to pass the 200 million landmark, Windows 7 raced past this, selling 240 million licenses in its first year of availability.
A chart from GlobalWebIndex below shows that it’s now considerably ahead of the never-terribly-popular Vista, an operating system now used by fewer than 100 million PC/laptop users. Windows 8 is also leagues in front of some of the more niche PC operating systems such the Apple Mac (4%, with just over 50 million users). But it’s still got considerable ground to cover before it approaches the popularity of Windows XP or Windows 7 – operating systems which can boast close to 388.5 million and 735.6 million users respectively.
