Microsoft is celebrating the first year of Windows 7 success. The software giant reports it has sold more than 240 million licenses to date.
p
Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows product management, said Windows 7 has exceeded expectations. Despite a product launch during what will go down in history as the Great Recession, corporations and consumers have adopted Windows 7. In less than a year, Windows 7 gained more than 17 percent of the global operating-system market share worldwide.
p
First realize that one of the reasons Windows 7 is so good is that Windows Vista was so bad, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. So it’s making up for some of the slip that Windows Vista caused. Windows 7 has largely eliminated what was a huge exposure in Microsoft’s ability to defend its own space.
p
subhead
Holding Off Challengers
/subhead
p
According to Microsoft’s internal research, people are four times more likely to recommend Windows 7 to a colleague or friend than they were a year ago. What’s more, in its first five months, the number of IT professionals recommending Windows 7 surpassed those recommending Windows XP.
p
Here are some more telling statistics: Windows 7 has a customer satisfaction rate of 94 percent and is on more than 1.2 billion PCs worldwide. Windows 7 was on 93 percent of new consumer PCs as of September, and nearly 90 percent of companies plan to upgrade or start upgrading to the new OS. Microsoft reports that, on average, Windows 7 can save companies $140 per PC per year, with a 131 percent return on investment in the first year.
p
As the dominant vendor, Microsoft has far more to lose than to gain. Stealing market share from Apple and Linux isn’t going to get them very far. So having a strong offering holds off challengers, Enderle said.
p
I should point…