Microsoft: 60 million Windows 8 licenses sold to date

Microsoft officials said the company has sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses to date.

Tami Reller, Chief Financial and Chief Marketing Officer for Windows shared the data at the JP Morgan Tech Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 8.

That 60 million figure includes "sell in to OEMs for new PCs" and upgrades, said Reller. She didn't explicitly cite whether the figure also includes any Enterprise Agreement/volume license sales.

"Windows 8 is a big, ambitious change," Reller acknowledged. She reiterated that Windows 8 sales are roughly in line with Windows 7 sales.

Microsoft said the company had sold 40 million licenses of Windows 8 as of the end of November.

Reller said the sales are "roughly in line with where we would have been with Windows 7."

NPD has cited that retail demand for Windows 8 was off through the end of 2012. 

In part, Windows 8's less-than-stellar retail sales can be attributed to the lack of touch-enabled laptops and tablets running the operating system. At CES this week, a number of Microsoft's PC-maker partners have announced new touch-screen Windows 8 and Windows RT hardware, but a number of these still won't be available for months.

Reller was also asked during her appearance at the conference about Windows 7 demand. She said Microsoft believes it is "well past the 60 percent deployment mark for Windows 7," as measured by looking at what PCs across all of its customer segments are currently running. She also said "over 90 percent of enterprises," meaning customers with 2,000 users or more, are "on their Windows 7 journey." 

Reller declined to comment on a question as to whether Microsoft would make a Surface ultrabook or a Surface phone. She did say that "it's really important for us to do well with Surface."

Microsoft shared another stat today. Company officials said that Microsoft has passed the 100 million Windows Store (Metro Style) app download mark.

Source : zdnet