Windows 7's first birthday: 240 million sold

Windows 7 was released a year ago today (October 22), and Microsoft has announced More than 240 Million Licenses Sold. The blog post by Brandon LeBlanc adds: "As of September, Windows 7 was running on 93% of new consumer PCs and has over 17% global OS market share (according to Net Applications as of October 1st)."

At the beginning of March, Microsoft's chief financial officer Peter Klein claimed that 90 million copies of Windows 7 had been sold, and during its July earnings call, Microsoft said the number had risen to 175 million. Windows XP sales will (in theory, at least) end today, so Windows 7 should comfortably beat 300 million by the end of the year. However, this could still be less than 25% of the installed base.

Microsoft has not provided any numbers for how many Windows 7 PCs are actually being used in business, and the vast majority of companies still appear to be using XP. The blog post does mention one success. It says:

General Motors has made significant progress on their Windows 7 deployment and their IT leadership loves the speed of our operating system. They have about 22,000 employees on Windows 7 and expect to have about 80,000 employees on Windows 7 by the end of 2010.

In a video, GM's Ken Michel says the number is 30,000 seats and that the year end "would give us 100% completion". This year, the company is buying about 40,000 PCs running Windows 7.

A follow-up post by Microsoft's Stephen L Rose, Happy Birthday Windows 7, says that "over 88% of all companies are currently piloting Windows 7". The number comes from an IDC study that says 39% of companies have already started the migration, and 25% will start in the next six months. "This is aggressive for Windows adoption," says IDC's slide.

Of course, since many companies have 100,000 or more PCs, the migration to Windows 7 is still likely to take another two or three years. Companies whose IT staff were too stupid to start testing and converting apps written for IE6 after Windows Vista came out could struggle to complete the migration in a reasonable time.

According to NetMarketShare, Windows had 91.08% of the operating system market in September, followed by Mac OS (5.3%), Apple's iOS (1.18%), Java ME (0.95%) and Linux (0.85%).

Windows XP remains by far the most used operating system, with a 60.03% share. XP is followed by Windows 7 (17.19%), Windows Vista (13.35%), Mac OS X 10.6 (2.72%) and Mac OS X 10.5 (1.67%). The numbers, based on website monitoring, include non-PC operating systems, and will therefore slightly understate Windows' PC market share.