Windows 7: The fastest selling operating system in history

I don't like reporting news without exact numbers, especially when making claims like this, but the Director of Marketing at Microsoft is fairly confident about this one: "Windows 7 is by far the fastest selling Operating System in history."

He doesn't give the exact number of activated licenses (why not?) but he does cite some rather astronomical PC sales in 2009. PC sales on Black Friday were up 63% over the same period in 2008 -- and for the entire holiday period, 2009 saw 50% more PC sales than the year before. Incidentally, the graph at Net Applications show Windows 7 as having a 5.71% share in the operating system market, up from 4% in November.

It's not particularly surprising, considering Windows is PC sales, but it still would've been nice to get some raw figures. In the mean time we'll just have to rely on data gathered by outside sources like Net Applications. Did you notice that XP is losing users faster than Vista? I suppose that's the die-hard Windows XP user base finally jumping ship to an operating system worthy of their money.

Tags: microsoft, operating system, OperatingSystem, osupdates, record, windows 7, Windows7