4 Million Windows 8 Licenses Sold: Ballmer
 

Microsoft sold over 4 million licenses to its Windows 8 operating system, which was launched last Friday worldwide. The figure was announced by CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at the Build conference, attended by over 2,000 developers. Ballmer cited these numbers to encourage developers to build apps for the new operating system, and its fundamentally changed user-interface. Microsoft claimed that there are over 120,000 apps in its Windows App Store, a number catching up with the roughly 700,000 apps on similar established distribution platforms such as Apple App Store and Google Play. "Windows 8 is the best opportunity for software development today," Ballmer stated. "Hundreds of millions of people are aching to use your apps, just dying to use your application."

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Source: Tom's Hardware

I feel so good to be one of the 4 million :rockout:

i just want to see what the haters say. windows 8 will sell and it will be awesome

meh not impressed Windows 8 is nice under the hood im just not impressed for many its a great os for others its not their are many for and against it im not so much against it as i am rather just feeling meh about it all. Metro is one of those for generic everyday purposes its a great os but for what i do with key applications its a step backwards not to mention if they force Metro interface on those apps it will result in said software being extremely user unfriendly.

stardock FTW!!!!!!!!!

proud to be one in 4 million hahahahaha

Yeah I was a proud owner of Vista once...then I finally was forced onto 7. Realized then how bad I really had it.

I've pretty much got rid of the metro frontend I just need get it to boot right to desktop and ill be happy

my question is how many of those 4million keys are from ppl just entering DELL and getting the code for $14 lol i bet if you pulled out those abusing that little option would cut the sales by a fairly sizeable chunk.

use star dock or pokki both bring back the start menu to the desktop AND give you the option to boot directly to desktop. pokki also gives you the option to disable the "hot corners"

Not to mention padding the numbers with sales to retailers. I'm sure a ton of these keys are still sitting on the shelves. Trusting Ballmer with these numbers would be like trusting Zuckerberg talking about his IPO pump and dump.

preach it

And I feel so good to not, Windows 8 does more wrong than it does right.

Congratulation to microsoft

Sheeples will buy anything that is new, doesn't matter if they need it or not. Just like the latest from Apple, Samsung, etc, etc...

Not that many.

I think what he neglects to mention is that 90% of those keys were sold to OEMs, not consumers.

So it's much more like 400,000 to consumers directly. :p

Would not surprise me. OEMs are always Window's biggest customer, not consumers directly.

I'm pretty sure those numbers does not include sold to OEM's, they don't buy Windows like that. They license.

It does say "4 Million Windows 8 Licenses Sold" not "4 Million Individual Windows 8 Licenses Sold". Just because a company like Dell or HP uses volume licenses instead of single system licenses doesn't mean that it isn't included in that number.

These were 4 million UPGRADE licenses. These were not total licenses sold. These were not OEM licenses. These were not including hardware sales. These were not including the full System Builder versions.

The 4 million number strictly refers to the number of people that took advantage of the upgrade license. So everyone's assertion that these are just OEM licenses "sitting on store shelves" are completely wrong. I'm not sure why TPU is the only sites I've read so far that doesn't clarify this fact, but go to any other site and they all spell it out in plain words; these 4 million were all upgrade licenses and nothing else. Of which, I am definitely one of the 4 million that took advantage of the early cheaper prices.

Edit: Apparently this is sourced from TomsHardware. Not at all surprised by their shoddy "journalism."

it doesn't really matter what licenses were sold, Microsoft is making money for their hard work, and YES it was hard work, programming is no joke trust me on this.

I didn't buy it, but my uncle did. All I can say that it run smooth.

I am one of those 4 million and I feel bad :(

No need to feel bad.

Does this include those sold to PC/laptop/tablet/phone manufacturers, or just private buyers?

If it does include those, it is not impressive whatsoever. Otherwise they are off to a great start.