Microsoft sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in six months, 250 million app downloads from WIndows Store

Microsoft CFO Tami Reller has announced that they have sold 100 million copies of Windows 8 OS in six months time. This is good news given the widespread news that Microsoft has been struggling to sell Windows 8 to end users. Even though the numbers may not be as impressive as that of Windows 7, we think that this is indeed good. Do remember that Windows 7’s predecessor was a major failure and users were desperate for a stable and solid OS and Windows 7 was able to appeal to these users. Given how slow Windows users are w.r.t upgrading their OS (unlike Linux and OS X users who jump right in for every release), it takes a mighty effort from Microsoft to make users jump into unknown territory from something as solid as Windows 7. A worrying stat here is that 60 million licences were sold in first two months but only 40 million were sold in last four months.

Also, during the same time frame, applications on Windows Store were downloaded 250 million times, a 6x increase since the release of OS and this is one stat that we are not impressed about. In simple terms, even if 50% of Windows 8 licenses are activated, only 5 apps are downloaded per users on average (and if you add up the sheer number of apps that enthusiasts usually download, Windows Store application adoption turns out to be extremely low).