heatlesssun
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A rough number that I see a lot of people use. There were about a billion PCs sold just the last three years so it seems like a very reasonable number, maybe on the low side.
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Microsoft Sells More Than 100M Windows 8 Licenses in 6 Months
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heatlesssun
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Sure all of these numbers a pretty big guesstimates but I don't think they are all that shaky or unreasonable. Netmarketshare and StatCounter show Windows 7 at about 50% market share. 50% of 1.5 billion is 750 million and I doubt many Windows 8 opponents would argue with that number.
Terminus
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It's my <b>genuine pleasure</b> to drive more hits to the [H]
I just don't really see the point in looking at absolute numbers when there is no real way of verifying them. I'm all for using dodgy numbers (with the understanding that they are dodgy) to get an idea of what might be going on, but there comes a point when the numbers are so shaky and/or they aren't telling you any new information.
For one, you actually need the total PC numbers from 2010 to really make a comparison with W7.
For two, you said earlier that the 100 mill, which you state is the limit of W8, doesn't include volume licences, who's to say a large portion of the 5% from StatCounter doesn't include a bunch of volume licences? So even if you think the 1.5 billion number is realistic, you can't make the statement that 67.5 million of the 100 million licences are "online", it could easily be far less than that.
For three, even if there is 1.5 billion PCs in use, who's to say they're online and visiting the sites that StatCounter uses.
For four, what is the composition of the 1.5 billion PCs (assuming 1.5 billion is accurate). I'm guessing StatCounter is taking the numbers for any device that has one of those OS's on it, is the 1.5 billion just desktop PCs or is it any device that has one of those OS's on it?
For five, you've really given no evidence to show confidence in the 1.5 billion number other than "I don't think it's unreasonable" and that there's around 1 billion PCs shipped in the past 3 years. That's really not good enough other to show that maybe you have the correct order of magnitude (within a factor of 10). It could just as easily be 1 billion, or 1.2 billion, or 2 billion, or 2.5 billion.
There's too many disconnects to make the numbers useful IMO.
Funny how they keep this artificially inflated number out of the statement of record which is the quarterly earnings report. Not a peep.
They can't have feet held to the fire with these P.R. announcements since they're just that - p.r. and marketing.
God love em but internally they know the real number and hopefully realize by now the facade can't go on forever, something will give.
They can't have feet held to the fire with these P.R. announcements since they're just that - p.r. and marketing.
God love em but internally they know the real number and hopefully realize by now the facade can't go on forever, something will give.
Can you point to any MS 10-Q where the numbers of licenses for each product were listed? I can't find one. MS does typically make press releases of OS sales milestone.
Other than wild accusations that the 100M Windows 8 licenses sold is somehow fraud, I have yet to see one tiny crumb of evidence to back up those claims. A glace at world-wide PC shipments the past 6 months, and the inclusion of Windows 8 on the large majority of those systems seems to back up the 100M number.
Sour grapes?
heatlesssun
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Yeah, its the number they announced. The conspiracy theories are cool and all but just by looking at the web traffic counters and other surveys, the 100 million licenses sold seems to align pretty well with that info. There are almost certainly at this point many tens of millions of Windows 8 machines out there, somewhere around the 70 million range would seems to be reasonable.
chockomonkey
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Right?
I don't understand why they force people who want that version of windows 8 to go to a 3rd-party dev to do it.
Why not just have an option during setup or even after?
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Zarathustra[H]
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I think it was an attempt to force their user base to learn the new interface, and thus have an easy transition to THEIR tablets instead of the competition.
heatlesssun
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100 million units in six months is pretty massive, nobody has ever come anywhere close to selling an OS at this level other than Microsoft. But I don't think that just an incremental upgrade to the desktop would have done much because of the PC market. Everyone around here thinks about the UI and upgrades. The bread and butter of Windows sales is on PCs, and most of the units out now are nothing but the same piece of recycled junk that has 7 one them. PC hardware has to improve a lot with better pricing on the good stuff in order to see any real uptick in Windows and PC sales.
Zarathustra[H];1039863570 said:I think it was an attempt to force their user base to learn the new interface, and thus have an easy transition to THEIR tablets instead of the competition.
That is why it was a mistake. It should have been the other way around...Make tablets people want to use and enjoy using. Make metro useful and people will umm use it. All without hurting sales of one of your core products. Windows 8 has some nice code optimization many users would surely like...Why upset your core and force them to decide if buying a product is worth the extra stress and time to learn... to do the same thing they are currently doing.
Work on the backend, make apps run everywhere. As demand for metro increases make updates to the PC OS to make it more and more metro like. Consumers then buy each version as they see fit and learn Metro as they go along. You have an increasing app base, extra income from backend sales and happy customers.
This way they lead their PC base into tablets, versus upset them and slowing down their cash cow. Every PC user can buy movies. music, apps(while learning metro by choice versus...) and if and when they buy a windows phone they already have apps purchased. Of course they would end up in court with about every company complaining they were leveraging their monopoly into other markets...but it is the direction they have to eventually go. If they are going to have to learn a new UI why not just learns a rivals UI?
It was a poor thought out move in my opinion.
They seem to be using number games to get to that number. Systems in use is all that maters from my pov. When you force every other product off market and sell only 8 and allow downgrades...Of course it will get solid sales number. Its marketshare for the same period is dramatically less...user adoption rate is what maters long-term imho. If you are going to force users to learn a new ui, they might decide to learn your rivals. If you give a user a useful tool, they are likely to use it. Especially if you seem to ignore their requests to do otherwise.
It is a cycle. What software has come out recently which makes one need new hardware? What hardware has come out to allow revolutionary new software. From my point of view there is simply not any software worth upgrading for...occasionally a game, but most new gamers I meet rather play on a console.
If they took all the performance improvements... Added new apps and made metro optional no one would even be debating if it was a superior product.
heatlesssun
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Metro provides a way to use Windows with touch and on tablets that wasn't available in prior versions of Windows.
PornoSatan
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Windows 8 should have defaulted to the desktop when it was released, and had a start menu. Metro could have still existed, and people would "explore" it every once in a while and tinker, then when the touchscreen laptops came, Windows could have defaulted to the Metro interface. If they did it this way literally no one would have complained, but they tried forcing everything on everyone and are now suffering the consequences. They did everything ass backwards, except for perhaps the early 'loophole' that allowed everyone to get it for almost free.
heatlesssun
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But there's more to Metro than even adding touch to Windows, it's about unifying Windows, Windows Phone and probably the Xbox. We should know next week but it's been all but confirmed that the next Xbox runs Windows 8 and several rumors have floated around that it will be compatible with the Windows Store. That could be huge.
I'm not claiming that Microsoft has executed the way it needed too, clearly there have been some mistakes, maybe appeasing desktop only user would have been the right thing but I think that would have only served to further delay Metro app development and given OEMs a pass on revamping their hardware, and crap hardware is a big problem for Windows.
Actually I think it would have improved Metro app adoption. Imagine being able to run the same apps on windows phones, windows tablets and windows itself. Whichever way you start you have an incentive to stick with Windows products. Everyone knows that the goal is the same interface everywhere the problem is they totally put the cart before the horse and focused in the wrong areas.
Currently my opinion is there is not a killer app convincing users it is worthwhile to pay for highend computing power so people only are replacing systems when they fail.
Again you bring up unifying card. Problem with this is that WP has a poor adoption rate it is failed/failing (except in 3rd world countries apparently as for NA no one gives a flying fuck about), business don't consider entertainment value of their employees thus they don't buy xboxes. Tablet sales are just starting and the growth is pretty abysmal compared to iOS when it debut sold 1/5 on the first day of all shipments of Windows Surface pro/rt tablets has to date. Again they are putting the cart before the horse trying to artificially create demand where there is none and punishing loyal users for it with Metro and steep learning curve (average user). To top it off since MS makes more then 2/3 of its revenue from business how the fuck does this make sense what kind of a broken stupid/moronic strategy is this? They should have release the tablet before 8 was released. There would have been no bias against metro because it would have been a better benchmark of what could have been better done on the desktop. This whole slash and burn strategy is worse then Mac PPC to X86 thing. Hell apple at least had people transition over gradually.
I'd lay any money that the next Xbox will not run Metro store apps. Simply no way. The certification process for xbox games & apps will be far more rigorous than the anything and everything HTML app garbage written by twelve year olds that they allow in the metro store now to pad the number.
They are very protective of their console platform, the competition is going to be much more fierce with Sony than the monopoly they enjoy on PC desktop, and allowing Metro apps to run on the new Xbox would be a hacker's paradise, way too big a back door.
heatlesssun
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Again, Microsoft isn't trying to sell as many PCs as Apple, it doesn't want to at this point because of the its OEM relationships. And you keep talking artificial demand, well we know real demand for PCs has been dropping for years, maybe trying to create artificial demand isn't such a bad idea. Especially if you can create devices that serve both the function of a PC and a tablet for the price of a higher end tablet.
And while you and I work in environments that a bare iron enterprise, especially me, lots of smaller and less targeted business like big banks do BYOD. I don't think the wall between a device that one works on and plays on is nearly as high as you think in most of the real world. And neither are tablets, they have plenty of uses in the business world. Not all businesses or back offices but enough.
The world is simply changing. Desktops are becoming less and less relevant and holding on to them will only result in Windows becoming something that know on will care about beyond certain large businesses in the next decade.
Thurrott described it as a "stripped down version of Windows 8". In order to keep the OS as simple as possible for reliability, I'd more likely expect that it's a minimal version a la "Windows Embedded Standard 8" with very limited driver support and gutted WDDM (in order to improve performance and allow direct access to GPU hardware features). See this page for the Windows 7 version: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embedded-standard-7.aspx
It certainly is possible that Xbox could become a compile target for Windows Store-like apps (maybe with fewer APIs than are available on the desktop, plus other APIs that are specific to Xbox hardware like Kinect 2), but it's unlikely that the next Xbox can run unmodified Windows 8 code. At the very least, the digital signatures will probably be separate between the platforms. The common base should make it easier to write apps for the Xbox though.
heatlesssun
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If you say so. There are a number of Metro games that are compatible with the Xbox 360 controller and there has been at least one pretty solid rumor that called the next Xbox as essentially a Windows 8 PC that's now been confirmed by others. I was thinking that this was this case when I saw this last year: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsappd...onents-to-deliver-great-metro-style-apps.aspx
This makes 0 sense. It's like Windows 8 opponents just make it up as they go. First a Trojan Horse, locked down, total Microsoft control and now a hacker's paradise?
heatlesssun
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The next Xbox is far more powerful than my Clover Trail tablet that supports Xbox 360 controllers in some Metro apps.