So making a good OS is actually good for profit. Hopefully Microsoft will learn that with Windows 8 (windows version 7.0, don’t ask)

But best OS ever? Please… smile

you better do that quote in the next ACM :p

Makes sense. I think that they stopped selling older versions of WIndows so of course 7 is outselling them.

I’m not sure that they are impressive.  It’s a new OS, so one would expect behaviour similar to any other OS release (for the same platform/market).  And the market is a heck of a lot bigger than when XP was released.  So, practically speaking, anything less than ‘significantly better than XP’ would be verging on ‘total flop’ (see Vista).

Hey, this is great news.

Except if your Dell. 54% drop in profits?
OUCH

Mr. Ballmer was mum on the specific numbers,

If they don’t give the complete numbers, what they really count, and cite a non MS third party for them I just simply don’t trust the statement. MS has a history of counting pre-orders and then counting the filling of those orders separately. They counted Vista sales for systems that came from the factory with XP downgrades. They’ve counted as sales numbers of licenses sold to PC manufacturers whether or not they went onto a PC that quarter. They have always played fast and loose with sales figures especially when they want some good press. Remember it was just a year ago when they were saying that Vista was selling light hotcakes. Until I see figures from some trustworthy source I’ll withhold judgement.

My mistake, Harry - the comparison Mr. Ballmer was making was of Windows 7 during the first X amount of days of release compared the same number of days of the earlier versions of Windows during the same X amount of days of their release.

I figured that, I was just being a wise guy

Congratulations, they’ve doubled the sales rate of the prior best selling version of Windows…

...In a market that is *more* than twice as large.

I’m having trouble finding hard numbers at the moment, but I seem to recall a fairly recent article that estimated the PC market has more than *quadrupled* in size since the Windows XP release.  If that’s the case, then it would mean 7 is selling half as well as XP did.  Mind you, that’s still a ways better than Vista managed, so I guess it is still an up-swing.

Nothing surprising.  It’s not as if all those people running XP are never ever going to upgrade.  There’s a lot of catch up going on by folks who were ready to upgrade with Vista but held it off because the product stank.

@voice

That’s what I was thinking. Maybe we should brace ourselves for the reports of numbers fudging . . . but whatever. I don’t use anything they make anymore, and now that they are finally being forced to do things in a more standards compliant fashion it probably doesn’t make much of a difference.

  vista-error
They’ve counted as sales numbers of licenses sold to PC manufacturers whether or not they went onto a PC that quarter. They have always played fast and loose with sales figures especially when they want some good press.