Windows 7 Becomes Fastest-Selling OS in the World

In mid-December, I took a look at our site statistics for the first half of the month to see the trend of Windows 7 adoption, and the results were rather impressive. At that time, 28.23% of our Windows visitors were using Windows 7. For an OS that was released a mere two months earlier, that says a lot. The acceleration of adoption has slowed, but it certainly continues, with that number rising to 33.88% during all of January.

According to recently-posted earnings from Microsoft, the trend certainly isn’t only with Techgage, but it’s industry-wide. Windows 7 has officially become the fastest-selling OS of all time, with a staggering 60 million licenses being issued since the launch up until a couple of days ago. That’s equivalent to 20% of the entire United States of America population! That… in just three months. Microsoft has reason for celebration.

Its Windows 7 success also led to record quarter, with a $19.02B USD reported in revenue, which is a 14% increase over the same quarter a year ago. Windows 7 wasn’t the only reason for such impressive revenue numbers, because Server 2008 R2 also played a role. Microsoft doesn’t make mention of just how large a role it played, but it’s safe to say that with Windows 7’s 60 million licenses, it couldn’t have been too large.

Going back to our stats, I expected to see Windows XP fall even further in the charts, but it surprisingly has gone up a couple of percentage points, to account for 46.72% of our total Windows visitors (which accounts for 88.94% of the total). Interestingly, though Windows 7 and XP saw a boost, our Linux and Mac OS X usage saw a decline, with 5.33% belonging to Linux (down from 6.14%) and 4.47% to Mac OS X (from 4.89%).

Now Microsoft’s brand image is at a new high and Microsoft just reported its best quarter in its history. Microsoft reports a net revenue of $19.02B USD, a 14 percent increase from the previous year. Microsoft also reported operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share of $8.51B USD, $6.66B USD and $0.74 USD per share, up 43 percent, 60 percent and 57 percent, respectively from a year ago. The revenue was boosted by $1.71B USD in deferred revenue on Windows 7 preorders, among other things.