Windows 7 Sells 150 Million Licenses Since October’s Launch

It’s far from being a secret that Windows 7 has been an overall success, and sales-wise, Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc has re-verified that fact with a report that 150 million licenses have been sold since the OS’ launch this past October. Unfortunately, whether or not this number represents the number of customers that have personally purchased a license vs. those that were purchased by resellers is not mentioned.

Regardless of that, though, Windows 7 has been a big success from multiple angles. Compared to Vista, it launched with few show-stopping issues, and even today its adoption seems to be ramping up. With reports of this 150 million number, I decided to once again take a look at our stats software to see how adoption has fared from our reader’s standpoint, and the results surprised me.

To put things into perspective, a bit of history should be brought back up. The first month our ad software was able to single out 7 as an OS was in December, less than two months after launch. That month, 86.77% of our readers were using a Windows OS, and of that, 29.78% were using 7. Given the fact that December 1 fell just five or so weeks after the official launch, that’s an impressive number.

In January, the numbers improved further, with 88.94% of our readers using Windows, and 33.88% of those using 7. Ever since then, the numbers have consistently gone up each month, and as it stood in May, 88.01% of our readers were using Windows 42.71% of those were using 7. Yes, about 2/5 of our readers are using Windows 7 as their primary OS… less than 8 months after launch. Wow.

For interest’s sake, Linux saw a 6.14% usage share in May, while Mac OS X fell not too far behind with 4.29%. Interestingly, the iPhone was responsible for .60% of our visits during the same month, with the iPod and iPad snuggling up right behind that with a combined 0.45% of visits.

It will be interesting to take a look at our stats once again in October, around the time of Windows 7’s one-year anniversary. Given the rapid growth, we may just see some sort of domination by that time where Windows OSes are concerned.

As I’ve said before, Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history with 7 copies of Windows 7 sold every second. Earlier this month, I published a post about Tami Reller’s keynote at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference. One of the points that stood out for me was her comment that between companies actively deploying and evaluating it, approximately 75% of enterprises are looking at Windows 7 for their organization. That’s amazing!