I am not quite sure why everyone is reporting this number as if it were some miraculous revival of MS. Windows 7 doesn't suck. Lots of people have been waitin

I am not quite sure why everyone is reporting this number as if it were some miraculous revival of MS. Windows 7 doesn't suck. Lots of people have been waiting, and waiting, and waaaaaaaaaaaiting to upgrade from XP. A lot of them gave up hope and moved to Macs; those users aren't going to be coming back. What MS might have done is stop the bleeding in the desktop OS market. It will take a couple more quarters to see if this is the case. I recently ordered 25 upgrades for sales and marketing people in my company and this sort of SMB activity may also make up a large portion of this growth in "consumer" licenses (Vista sucked so bad we were willing to maintain an EOL version of Windows and even "upgrade" boxes to XP that were shipped to us with Vista.) In terms of how this fits into the general economic picture, I am waiting to see evidence of this activity as being an upgrade _to_ a Windows 7 machine vs upgrades of existing computers to a new rev of Windows. If non-Apple PC sales show a similar increase then this claim may be valid, but if Apple growth continues to outpace other hardware vendors you will be seeing evidence that this is more of an upgrade in place than any real growth of the Windows ecosystem. ["Interesting" may be one word to describe Windows Phone (or whatever they are calling it this month) but most reviews and reports do not seem share your belief that it is in any way indicative of MS finally "bringing things together"...]