Couple of Hundred Million PCs to Be Sold Ahead of Windows 8’s 2012 Launch

At least some 200 million PCs will be sold ahead of the launch of Windows 8, according to Microsoft.

The figure is extremely interesting since it appears to indirectly confirm speculation that Windows 8 will in fact launch in the first half of 2012, and not in the second half as previously believed.

At the Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 last week, Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President, Original Equipment Manufacturer Division was on stage talking about the Redmond company’s relationship with original equipment manufacturers.

Guggenheimer mentioned that together with its OEM partners, the software giant would sell a “couple of hundred million PCs between now and “Windows 8”.”

To put things into perspective, market analysis from Gartner estimated that PC shipments worldwide would surpass 400 million units in 2011.

Per the Redmond company's figures, in excess of 400 million Windows 7 licenses have already been sold worldwide since the operating system was launched in late 2009. That’s about 200 million licenses every 10 months.

According to statistics from Gartner, PC shipments worldwide in the second quarter of 2011 grew by 2.3% to 85.2 million units. The first also revealed that worldwide PC shipments totaled some 84.3 million units in the first quarter of this year.

All it takes is some simple math to forecast that Microsoft will sell another 200 million Windows 7 licenses in less than a year, and that OEMs will push well over 200 million PCs, in the same period of time, surely less than three quarters of the year.

One potential scenario around the release of the next major iteration of Windows has Windows 8's launch reportedly set for April 2012.

This piece of information has not been confirmed by the Redmond company. Speculation reveals that Microsoft could release Windows 8 Beta at BUILD in September, the Release Candidate (RC) in January, and RTM the OS in the first quarter of 2012, targeting a release in April.