Microsoft today said that Windows 7 has sold about 240 million licenses in year one. That is, according to Microsoft ahead of plan, and almost twice the pace of Windows Vista. However, it is amazing to see that Windows XP may have still captured a decent portion of the market: If you want an official new copy of Vista or XP, you will have to buy it today.
It is always difficult to compare retail and license sales numbers and especially has tendency to provide only one or the other. That said, 240 million licenses sold in one year is an impressive achievement by any measure and a number that is, for sure, the envy of any tech company, including Apple. However, we were wondering how those 240 million units really compare to Vista.
Vista launched to the general public at the End of January, 2007. Preceding that launch, we saw the release of the business version of the software as well as three months of “Express Upgrade” sales, which Microsoft initiated as Vista was late and missed, physically, the important holiday season. In early January of 2008, Microsoft said it had reached the 100 million unit milestone, but these were retail copies only. By August of 2008, 180 million licenses were sold in 19 months of general availability, hinting to a approximate sales pace of about 9 million licenses per month. If we include the Express Upgrade timeframe, the pace decreases to about 8 million units per month – or about 96 million licenses within the first 12 months (October 2006 – October 2007).
However, there was another number, which accounts for the initial sales spike at the introduction and Express Upgrade rush of Vista. We stumbled across a note from Microsoft from October 2007,in which the company claimed that 88 million copies were sold at retail and more than 40 million licenses in addition to that. So it appears that Vista sold about 128 million licenses in year one.
The problem with those numbers is that they look silly if we consider shipments numbers alone. They always need the comparison to overall PC shipments. In the past, we were always told that every new Microsoft OS was the best-selling OS, even Vista, but that was largely due to the fact that the PC market had substantially increased since the release of the previous OS as well.
Windows 7 has sold 85% more units in the first year in absolute numbers, but how does that relate to the overall market?
It turns out that, if we take the PC market evolution in consideration, Windows 7 does much better that Vista as well, but its improvement in this view shrinks in half to a gain of 42%. In 2007, the global PC industry sold 267 million PCs, according to IDC. Windows Vista’s share of that market was about 48%, if we assume a market of about 128 million Vista licenses. That share, was, by the way, much lower than what we have seen at previous OS introductions. XP was said to have exceeded a share of well north of 70% in its first year.
Windows 7′s share is, based on estimated PC shipments of 355 million units this year , according to IDC, somewhere in the range of 68%. That is a much better result than Vista, but this number still leaves quite a bit of room for other operating systems. Add Mac OS X with a share of about 5-8% and Linux with about 1-3% and we know that, with some margin of error, about 20% of the market went to other operating systems – especially Windows Vista and XP. XP and Vista will die for good tomorrow and will be removed from retail, but we know that Vista was effectively killed by Microsoft quite some time ago and XP may have captured the lion’s share of those 20%.
For an operating system that is nearly a decade old, that is a great result, even if Microsoft won’t advertise that.
Overall, 66% of global PC users still use Windows XP. Windows XP, 3284 days old today, has currently a market share of about 17% and Vista about 15%.
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