While Windows 8 has yet to take off in a big way, it’s far from deserving of the title “failure”, even though many bloggers and net users out there claim that’s what it is.
For Microsoft, it is important that Windows 8 becomes accepted as it will lay the groundwork for future versions of Windows. The Start UI isn’t going anywhere, folks.
Still, from a dollars-earned point of view, Windows 8 is already a success. A month after arriving on the market Microsoft boasted about 40 million devices being sold. Now after another month, we are at 60 million. No matter what’s going on with Windows 8’s acceptance rate in the home and enterprise, this is no number to sneeze at. Microsoft has made money from 60 million Windows 8 and RT devices. Not at all bad, I say.
You might be scratching your head here, “Is there really 60 million devices out there among everyday consumers and those in the enterprise world?” No, there isn’t.
The truth is that many of those 60 million licenses are from OEM vendors that have bought the license to install on their PCs. These devices are sitting around at warehouses and elsewhere, not in the hands of consumers. For Microsoft though, a sale is still a sale. It also says something pretty clear: vendors and other hardware partners aren’t running from Windows 8. They haven’t given up on it, or else we wouldn’t hae seen them buying more licenses and making more hardware.
They would instead be sitting on what they have, or instead buying Windows 7 licenses by the dozen, or even considering Linux. The truth is that, love or hate Windows, there isn’t a real alternative for vendors, or consumers for that matter (other than maybe Linux and Mac). And once you get past the changes in Windows 8, there are quite a few positive about it as well.
Windows 8 isn’t a runaway success, but it is still doing reasonably well and it is too early to pass harsh judgment on it. That said, it is true that enterprise adoption is slow. Odds are that only a few small percentage of the Windows 8 devices out in the hands of consumers are being utilized for business purposes at this point.
What do you think of Windows 8? Are you surprised they’ve already sold 60 million licenses or not?
