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Tami Reller, the Chief Marketing and Financial Officer for Microsoft Windows, participated in a Q&A session with Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc which brings everyone up to date on Windows 8 and its progress since its release three months ago.

You can read the entire post over at the Blogging Windows site – Windows 8 at 90 days- Q&A with Tami Reller – but here are some of the highlights:

Windows 8 momentum:

  • More than 60 million licenses have been sold, on par with the record setting pace we saw with Windows 7.
  • Since the Windows Store launched on October 26th, the number of apps has more than quadrupled, and app downloads have passed the 100 million downloads in 2 months.

Windows 8 usage patterns:

  • People are quickly and successfully learning Windows 8. 50% of users get through the out of the box experience in less than 5 minutes.
  • On the first day, nearly everyone launches an app, finds the desktop, and discovers charms
  • After 2 weeks, the average person doubles the number of tiles on Start. By early January, we’d delivered over 45 billion unique live tile updates.

Now some of these numbers may sound quite familiar as they were mentioned in the Microsoft Q4 financial results about 10 days ago as well as at the 60 day mark of Windows 8 being on the market. I have not seen some of those numbers under the usage header before and I find them quite interesting to see. In fact, I think more usage data should be released so we can get a better picture of how people are using Windows 8.

However, the big number that is missing is confirmation of how many Surface RT devices were sold since they hit the market back on 26 October 2012.  You may recall recent updates from IDC, as reported by GeekWire and many others,  reported that only 1 million Surface RT units were shipped.  That total sold number continues to be very elusive to say the least.

With the upcoming release of Surface Pro on 09 February 2013 it would be interesting to know how Surface RT did on its own before the stats getting jumbled together in one reported number of Surface devices sold.