After many months of silence about the sales of Windows 8 we finally have an update on that figure.

It was May of last year when Microsoft revealed that over 100 million licenses for Windows 8 had been sold. That means only 100 million more have been sold in the subsequent 9 months.

According to a post from Mary Jo Foley over at the All About Microsoft blog at ZD Net the updated figure was revealed by Tami Reller. Reller is the Executive Vice President of Marketing for Microsoft.

She was speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

Foley provided a history in her story of Microsoft’s announcements relating to Windows 8 sales since it hit the market in October 2012:

Windows 8 and Windows RT went on sale on October 26, 2012. Microsoft officials said they sold more than 40 million copies of Windows 8 the first month it was commercially available. On January 8, 2013, Microsoft officials said the company had sold 60 million licenses of Windows 8 to date. On May 6, 2013, Microsoft officials said the company surpassed the 100 million Windows 8 licenses sold milestone. At that time, the Softies said that 100 million figure was on par with the number of Windows 7 licenses the company sold in its first six months on the market.

Although it appears Windows 8 was staying alongside of Windows 7’s own selling pace early on it has quickly slipped behind as evidence by the numbers announced today.

I wrote the other day about the direction Microsoft Windows is heading in and liked I said in that post – the obituary for Windows 8 was written well before it ever hit the market – and that appears to be something the OS was never going to be able to completely recover from.

It is likely that Windows 8 will always be remembered right alongside of Windows Vista for its failure however, I stand by the fact that Windows 8 was a bold step by Microsoft that was necessary to move things forward one way or another.

Although selling over 200 million licenses is certainly not a failure in any sense of the word.

Via: All About Microsoft – Mary Jo Foley