It is Official, Windows 7 is a Success

August 19, 2010 By Ryan Fleming

After a slow start, Windows 7 is officially a big success, and it is finally outselling XP.

It would be easy to say that it was inevitable, but it really wasn’t. After the dismal failure of Vista, Microsoft needed a bona fide hit. After 10 months, it appears that they officially have that with Windows 7.

Microsoft has released its quarterly earnings, and as part of those earnings, Microsoft announced that it has sold over 175 million copies of the operating system, and projections show that as many as 350 million copies may be sold worldwide by the end of the year. Currently, Microsoft is selling roughly 30 million Windows 7 licenses per month.

It is also is important to note that sales of XP are finally beginning to decline, as more and more users are switching over to Windows 7 for personal and business use. Zdnet is reporting Windows 7 accounted for 7.4-percent of all corporate PCs after its first six months, and that number is increasing by about 1.25-percent increase per month. By comparison, Vista plateaued at 12.6-percent of the corporate market after three years.

XP has an end-of-life date of April 2014, when Microsoft will stop its extended support of the operating system. Vista will have mainstream support through April 2012, then receive extended support until April of 2017, while Windows 7 will feature mainstream support until January 2015, and extended support through January 2020.With the support life of XP coming to a close, the sales of Windows 7 in both the home and corporate worlds should begin to increase at an exponential pace.

Currently 70-75-percent of corporations are running XP. If the current rate of Windows 7 adoption continues, the new OS will likely overtake XP in corporate settings by 2011. If the sales increase, which seems likely as more and more people are accepting Windows 7, that date could be significantly shortened.

Showing 7 comments

bryan at 9:39am 19th September 2010 I have been running windows 7 for 6 month now and it's a good time coming , instead of xp as it was ok but windows 7 is so amazing on my laptop and all things cool are in the right place Areo,screen-savers,my i-pod just flows through it 5th gen, just everthing is the dog's : ) It has the wow factor for say new users as it has many great items but as an old hander im still totally amazed how microsoft and the crew have pulled this off 100% worth your money , im on windows 7 pro and how happy am I...........JUST TO ADD Y'AAAAASSSSSS.
foo at 5:57am 20th August 2010 Microsoft is selling roughly 30 million Windows 7 licenses per month. But how many of those licenses are the cheap Starter version?
1. john at 6:35am 20th August 2010 .i don't think the starter version is included in that 30M per month...cuz u cant buy a license of a starter version cause it is already preinstalled on a certain pc or laptop...the licenses are those like professional,ultimate,etc..
  1. Erika at 11:29am 20th August 2010 John, The license is of course sold with a PC that has it pre-installed. The price of the license is in the cost of the system....nothing is free.
upurz at 2:22am 20th August 2010 it would be a great news if Windows 7 outsold XP during the first month but after 10 months!?!? it is bound to happen as more and more manufacturers package Windows 7 and don't offer Windows XP anymore to all their product lines. and with the announcement that XP support will stop after a few years who would be stupid enough to buy XP with new hardware? and guess what, windows 8 will outsell windows 7. then windows 9 will outsell windows 8! if this clown gets paid for writing articles like this then i should be paid higher for what i just wrote which is very obvious!
1. Erika at 11:28am 20th August 2010 Umm no, you sound like an idiot to me. Even Windows Vista didn't outsell XP, so to say that obviously Windows 7 will outsell XP is ludicrous. A good OS will always outsell a bad one.
ioman at 1:39pm 19th August 2010 I haven't had any serious issues with Windows 7. Occasionally I get an error message saying my video card driver stopped responded and has been restarted. That's about it. Otherwise, perfectly happy! Way better than Vista.