14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft yesterday decided to break the news on Windows 8 sales and revealed that in 15 months since launch, the company sold a total of 200 million licenses.
While it’s hard to determine whether Microsoft is satisfied with these figures or not, the new stats actually help us find out if the company’s modern platform is more successful than its predecessors or not.
Basically, Windows 8 is still lagging behind Windows 7, but there’s no surprise here, especially because many Windows XP users are going for this particular operating system when they are required to upgrade to a newer platform.
Microsoft sold a total of 240 million Windows 7 licenses in just 12 months, so it’s pretty clear that Windows 7 had much more consumer appeal than its successor.
But the question is how’s Windows 8 doing as compared to Microsoft’s biggest flop in history Windows Vista?
The answer is as simple as it could be. Often referred to as “the new Vista,” Windows 8 is actually selling a lot better, even though statistics provided by third-party analysts out there don’t seem to reflect this different.
According to Microsoft, customers purchased 200 million Windows 8 licenses in 15 months, while Windows Vista needed 18 months only to reach the 180 million sold licenses threshold.
As far as the market share is concerned right now, Windows 8 and 8.1 currently hold a share that’s near 10 percent, while Windows Vista is unsurprisingly losing ground and rapidly dropping to 3 percent.
Windows 7, on the other hand, is the king of the OS market and continues to lead the charts with more than 45 percent of computers worldwide running it right now. And if Microsoft doesn’t change its modern OS soon, Windows 7 is very likely to boost its market share even more.