Microsoft Claims a Billion Windows Installs by End of 2008

eldavojohn writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed yesterday that there will be a billion machines running Windows within a year. 'The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion. If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.'"

Comments

vm's

[misfit815]

Yeah, he's probably right... if you include all the vm's we run to sandbox stuff...

J

The main question

[baudilus]

Are they counting pirated copies?

But is Windows is in top 3 OSs even?

[ceeam]

I think that the average household has more Unix systems running for them than Windows. For example - I know for sure that my DVD player and my ADSL modem have Linux running in them. My TV, phones, etc - frankly no idea. Maybe some Unix too, maybe something else. But I heard that this thing runs them most: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project

Yeah, desktop is still important but with things like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC gaining momentum I hope Windows will be further sliding into irrelevancy.

More than Apple? Slashdot article says not yet

[objekt]

From TFA

"The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple,"

From http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/184 0206

"According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August."

Are we to believe all these Vista installs are simply not browsing the web?

Re:Why surprised?

[pogson]

see http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=C0_7_1

There are lots of PCs out there. I have seen a few '95 and '98 machines still in use (Horrors!).

The aspect that eludes M$ is that of the existing PCs, very few can run Vista. M$ plans to kill off XP next year for new licences, and upgrades of XP soon. Will the world trash hundreds of millions of working PCs, PIII and later? Why would they? The world will find Linux ready to run on them with modern software. It takes a salesman to announce a problem with the M$ empire is an advantage.

Whether it likes it or not, the world will not trash that many working PCs and M$ will have to supply a product for them or drop out. This is not like the good old days when M$ had to persuade folks to shift from 8MHz CPUs to 400MHz CPUs where they could see a real benefit. Nowadays, 3000 MHz CPUs are idling and they want folks to run dual core models that can do 200 frames per second in high resolution to read text.