6 ms·

After 15 months, Windows 8 has sold 100 million fewer copies than Windows 7 did

29 points by jonathansizz 13y ago

joshmn 13y ago
Kind of misleading. Let us not forget that people were coming from the shitshow that was Vista (before all the service packs / hotfixes were applied) or XP if they didn't get Vista. The latter made people long overdue for an overhaul.
damian2000 13y ago
Not sure how widespread this is, but in my own experience businesses are actively avoiding buying or upgrading to Windows 8.
- whistlerbrk 13y ago
  They actively avoided upgrading to IE-anything-above-6 as well. It's hard to draw a lot of conclusions from these articles.
  - bronson 13y ago
    For good reason. IE7 was even worse than 6.
    - watty 13y ago
      IE8 works on Windows XP too...
      - a3n 13y ago
        And probably breaks some browser-based enterprise apps that are bug-dependent on IE6.
- DrStalker 13y ago
  We're actively avoiding it because of the interface issues, but even if Microsoft restored the start button and desktop there's no business need for an upgrade. There may be businesses that will benefit from of the new features, but we're not one of them.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  A lot of businesses jumped from XP to 7. Maybe Microsoft has a chance to hold on to them if 9 isn't garbage. Scarily, I also see a possibility that business start jumping ship to Apple, Ubuntu and/or some Google ChromeOS offering on the desktop, and Active Directory, Exchange, and MSSQL servers the last remnants of Microsoft operating systems in the enterprise. Granted, I think it's a slim chance, and I might be crazy.
  - toyg 13y ago
    Apple, yes (through BYO and the iPhone/iPad trojan horses). The rest, probably not. Any large business with an IT department worth its salt would steer well clear of "supportless" nonstandard oddities like ChromeOS.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      But a googleOS that just connects to google services, supplimented with a few apps? I could see that making headway in small businesses.
higherpurpose 13y ago
The decline of Windows has begun, and this time Windows is not coming back (in a strong way).
- EpicEng 13y ago
  XP sold 120 million in the same time period. Care to explain your view?
  - hijinx 13y ago
    In 2001 the PC install base was less than a 10th of what it is today. Raw sales are kind of a terrible comparison. Relevant to MS's revenue, sure, but not a good means of comparison. The better comparison would be the relative market share. I haven't seen numbers, but I would guess that XP's market share was substantially better than W8's over the same duration, even if only considering PCs operating on Windows.
    - EpicEng 13y ago
      I'm kind of curious about that number and how it was obtained. Do you have a link? I couldn't find anything good.
      - hijinx 13y ago
        I did a quick check right now and couldn't find it either (always easy to find shipment numbers, but not user base). I am pretty sure it was an IDC or Gartner chart that I saw that showed worldwide pc users per year. Let me do some checking this afternoon when I have more free time and will post a link.
      - hijinx 13y ago
        I am going to have to recant I guess. Quickly looking through the IDC, Gartner, World Bank and Strategy Analytics numbers, I can't find something to cite. If you look at global device shipment numbers from 1996 - 2013 and plot shipments per year with a 5 year tailing use to estimate the user base (which seems the norm for the PC user base values) it seems like 15-20% would be closer to the average, not 10% like I stated. I doubt it's important enough to either of us to spend the time to it. ;)
dangrossman 13y ago
First 15 months sales: * Windows 8: 200 million * Windows 7: 300 million * Windows Vista: ~128 million * Windows XP: ~120 million (based on an IDC estimate, as Microsoft released few early sales figures for XP). It looks to me like Windows 7 was the anomaly: a stronger PC market at the time, and 8+ years worth of computers running XP looking for an upgrade. Vista was not a realistic option mainly due to a lack of drivers at release, much higher system requirements, and absurd pricing-- up to $359 for a boxed copy. By the time Windows 7 came out, manufacturers had gotten around to creating the Vista drivers that'd also work in 7, computers that would've been sluggish in Vista could easily run 7, and the price of the OS was slashed. Getting people and businesses to upgrade again when they just did so in the past few years is a tougher sell. The hardware available at the release of Windows 8 was pretty un-exciting too, which probably contributed to 2013's record-breaking decline in PC sales overall. Only in the past 3-4 months have the updated models from most manufacturers made it into stores -- touchscreens, new form factors and doubled battery life -- reasons for people to actually want to buy a new PC.
- dmix 13y ago
  Hacker News conducting the investigative journalism for the win again.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  I'm not so sure. There are more PCs around now than there were then, and the number of computing devices has grown vastly. However they aren't windows PCs...
- arocks 13y ago
  Windows 7 is not an anomaly, the OS sales numbers should be on an increasing trend. Windows 8 is the anomaly that is comparable to the failure of Vista. I am pretty sure that they could have achieved a sales better than Windows 7, if the product was really compelling. Unlike in the past, the OS upgrade cycle has shortened considerably thanks to mobile devices. People don't really mind upgrading their OS even though Windows users might be more reluctant than others. But I am sure that the Windows 8 user interface changes are the real reason why most people would not even want to upgrade.
bruceb 13y ago
Well there is also no need to upgrade for a lot of people. A dual core/quad core computer with windows 7 it can run office, media, and the internet perfectly fine and pretty fast. This is what most people use computer for. So Windows 8 need not be bad for it not to be purchased it is just that it is not needed.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jonathansizz 13y ago
Whatever the larger significance, surely these sales figures represent billions of lost dollars (or dollars not earned) for Microsoft? EDIT: to downvoters - I'm just assuming that Microsoft make at least tens of dollars per licence sold. Am I wrong?
sjwright 13y ago
Windows 7 was the first compelling upgrade of Windows in over eight years, it pretty much works, and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing. Windows 8 is a customer-hostile mess that adds very little to the Windows 7 formula.
- nly 13y ago
  > and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing. Huh? I ran Windows XP x64 Edition with no problems before Vista even arrived.
  - hobs 13y ago
    A LOT of drivers were not available for xp 64, otherwise you are right, it was just fine.
    - sjwright 13y ago
      Yep, hence why I qualified it with properly.
leobelle 13y ago
I recently bought the first Windows computer I have had in years. It came with Windows 8. What a disaster. In a few days I upgraded to Windows 8.1 which made things a bit better. You can right click on a start menu button and pretty much get a much reduced functional start menu and boot into desktop mode by default. I'm glad Microsoft is backtracking on this. What they did was bold, but the product they forced down everyone's throat was just so terrible. Maybe it was innovative, but so much functionality and customizability was stripped. The Windows Store is a joke. I hate metro apps, I hate that Skype is a metro app, it's the only one I use and it bugs me that I can't put it on the desktop somewhere. I just want metro to go away forever. Luckily under the hood is still that vaunted desktop Windows from old. It just needs to come back as soon as possible.
- hamanahamana 13y ago
  http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-windows/downloading/ http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-windows/dow...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- eCa 13y ago
  http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/ or http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ gives you the start menu it should've shipped with.
- sequence7 13y ago
  Could you explain what it is that you actually hate about Windows 8? I keep on seeing this sentiment and I just don't get it. I've been using it since it was released and it just feels like 7 with a flatter desktop and a different start menu. I get that a lot of people lost their minds when there wasn't a button that you could click to get to the start menu but since that's been added in 8.1 if you want to completely ignore the new UI you pretty much can. Is it just the fact that things have changed that causes all the hate or is there some rational explanation that I'm completely missing? You're right the Windows Store is pretty feeble but if you hate it's easy to ignore.
uvTwitch 13y ago
Much of an improvement that Windows 8 is, this doesn't surprise me - There is no -need- to upgrade to it over Windows 7. It's not like the difference between XP and 7, where users were upgrading from an ageing buggy mess (or in the case of upgrades from vista, just a buggy mess).
midnitewarrior 13y ago
I think these numbers are a testament to how good Windows 7 is. There was definitely a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista, but, with Windows 7 being so good, Windows 8 is a tough sell for some consumers. In my experience, Windows 7 has been more stable than Windows 8. For average users, there's no real reason to upgrade.
blinkingled 13y ago
It almost sounds like Microsoft would be better off adopting the Ubuntu model - two consumer releases supported for a shorter period followed by one long term supported Pro release. The consumer release can be priced to sell the pro one can retain today's Windows 8 Pro pricing. The consumer release can push the boundaries in terms of features and experimentation, while the pro release can pickup stabilized Pro centric features and security updates from it. While they are at it they can also deemphasize Metro from the Pro edition, leaving it as a mostly consumer feature.
EEGuy 13y ago
What I'd like to see in the next iteration of Windows is desktop application windows that are /scalable/, as in the "pinch to zoom" on smartphones, but mouseable. On Windows' windows, all four corners presently control clipping. Two of those four could be devoted to scaling instead of clipping. This is something a desktop OS could do to increase my productivity. One desktop /application/, Real VNC Viewer, does this -- and I find it very convenient.

29 points by jonathansizz 13y ago

Kind of misleading. Let us not forget that people were coming from the shitshow that was Vista (before all the service packs / hotfixes were applied) or XP if they didn't get Vista. The latter made people long overdue for an overhaul.

damian2000 13y ago

Not sure how widespread this is, but in my own experience businesses are actively avoiding buying or upgrading to Windows 8.

whistlerbrk 13y ago
They actively avoided upgrading to IE-anything-above-6 as well. It's hard to draw a lot of conclusions from these articles.
- bronson 13y ago
  For good reason. IE7 was even worse than 6.
  - watty 13y ago
    IE8 works on Windows XP too...
    - a3n 13y ago
      And probably breaks some browser-based enterprise apps that are bug-dependent on IE6.
DrStalker 13y ago
We're actively avoiding it because of the interface issues, but even if Microsoft restored the start button and desktop there's no business need for an upgrade. There may be businesses that will benefit from of the new features, but we're not one of them.
pessimizer 13y ago
A lot of businesses jumped from XP to 7. Maybe Microsoft has a chance to hold on to them if 9 isn't garbage. Scarily, I also see a possibility that business start jumping ship to Apple, Ubuntu and/or some Google ChromeOS offering on the desktop, and Active Directory, Exchange, and MSSQL servers the last remnants of Microsoft operating systems in the enterprise. Granted, I think it's a slim chance, and I might be crazy.
- toyg 13y ago
  Apple, yes (through BYO and the iPhone/iPad trojan horses). The rest, probably not. Any large business with an IT department worth its salt would steer well clear of "supportless" nonstandard oddities like ChromeOS.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    But a googleOS that just connects to google services, supplimented with a few apps? I could see that making headway in small businesses.

higherpurpose 13y ago

The decline of Windows has begun, and this time Windows is not coming back (in a strong way).

EpicEng 13y ago
XP sold 120 million in the same time period. Care to explain your view?
- hijinx 13y ago
  In 2001 the PC install base was less than a 10th of what it is today. Raw sales are kind of a terrible comparison. Relevant to MS's revenue, sure, but not a good means of comparison. The better comparison would be the relative market share. I haven't seen numbers, but I would guess that XP's market share was substantially better than W8's over the same duration, even if only considering PCs operating on Windows.
  - EpicEng 13y ago
    I'm kind of curious about that number and how it was obtained. Do you have a link? I couldn't find anything good.
    - hijinx 13y ago
      I did a quick check right now and couldn't find it either (always easy to find shipment numbers, but not user base). I am pretty sure it was an IDC or Gartner chart that I saw that showed worldwide pc users per year. Let me do some checking this afternoon when I have more free time and will post a link.
    - hijinx 13y ago
      I am going to have to recant I guess. Quickly looking through the IDC, Gartner, World Bank and Strategy Analytics numbers, I can't find something to cite. If you look at global device shipment numbers from 1996 - 2013 and plot shipments per year with a 5 year tailing use to estimate the user base (which seems the norm for the PC user base values) it seems like 15-20% would be closer to the average, not 10% like I stated. I doubt it's important enough to either of us to spend the time to it. ;)

dangrossman 13y ago

First 15 months sales: * Windows 8: 200 million * Windows 7: 300 million * Windows Vista: ~128 million * Windows XP: ~120 million (based on an IDC estimate, as Microsoft released few early sales figures for XP). It looks to me like Windows 7 was the anomaly: a stronger PC market at the time, and 8+ years worth of computers running XP looking for an upgrade. Vista was not a realistic option mainly due to a lack of drivers at release, much higher system requirements, and absurd pricing-- up to $359 for a boxed copy. By the time Windows 7 came out, manufacturers had gotten around to creating the Vista drivers that'd also work in 7, computers that would've been sluggish in Vista could easily run 7, and the price of the OS was slashed. Getting people and businesses to upgrade again when they just did so in the past few years is a tougher sell. The hardware available at the release of Windows 8 was pretty un-exciting too, which probably contributed to 2013's record-breaking decline in PC sales overall. Only in the past 3-4 months have the updated models from most manufacturers made it into stores -- touchscreens, new form factors and doubled battery life -- reasons for people to actually want to buy a new PC.

dmix 13y ago
Hacker News conducting the investigative journalism for the win again.
lostlogin 13y ago
I'm not so sure. There are more PCs around now than there were then, and the number of computing devices has grown vastly. However they aren't windows PCs...
arocks 13y ago
Windows 7 is not an anomaly, the OS sales numbers should be on an increasing trend. Windows 8 is the anomaly that is comparable to the failure of Vista. I am pretty sure that they could have achieved a sales better than Windows 7, if the product was really compelling. Unlike in the past, the OS upgrade cycle has shortened considerably thanks to mobile devices. People don't really mind upgrading their OS even though Windows users might be more reluctant than others. But I am sure that the Windows 8 user interface changes are the real reason why most people would not even want to upgrade.

bruceb 13y ago

Well there is also no need to upgrade for a lot of people. A dual core/quad core computer with windows 7 it can run office, media, and the internet perfectly fine and pretty fast. This is what most people use computer for. So Windows 8 need not be bad for it not to be purchased it is just that it is not needed.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jonathansizz 13y ago

Whatever the larger significance, surely these sales figures represent billions of lost dollars (or dollars not earned) for Microsoft? EDIT: to downvoters - I'm just assuming that Microsoft make at least tens of dollars per licence sold. Am I wrong?

sjwright 13y ago

Windows 7 was the first compelling upgrade of Windows in over eight years, it pretty much works, and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing. Windows 8 is a customer-hostile mess that adds very little to the Windows 7 formula.

nly 13y ago
> and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing. Huh? I ran Windows XP x64 Edition with no problems before Vista even arrived.
- hobs 13y ago
  A LOT of drivers were not available for xp 64, otherwise you are right, it was just fine.
  - sjwright 13y ago
    Yep, hence why I qualified it with properly.

leobelle 13y ago

I recently bought the first Windows computer I have had in years. It came with Windows 8. What a disaster. In a few days I upgraded to Windows 8.1 which made things a bit better. You can right click on a start menu button and pretty much get a much reduced functional start menu and boot into desktop mode by default. I'm glad Microsoft is backtracking on this. What they did was bold, but the product they forced down everyone's throat was just so terrible. Maybe it was innovative, but so much functionality and customizability was stripped. The Windows Store is a joke. I hate metro apps, I hate that Skype is a metro app, it's the only one I use and it bugs me that I can't put it on the desktop somewhere. I just want metro to go away forever. Luckily under the hood is still that vaunted desktop Windows from old. It just needs to come back as soon as possible.

hamanahamana 13y ago
http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-windows/downloading/ http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-windows/dow...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eCa 13y ago
http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/ or http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ gives you the start menu it should've shipped with.
sequence7 13y ago
Could you explain what it is that you actually hate about Windows 8? I keep on seeing this sentiment and I just don't get it. I've been using it since it was released and it just feels like 7 with a flatter desktop and a different start menu. I get that a lot of people lost their minds when there wasn't a button that you could click to get to the start menu but since that's been added in 8.1 if you want to completely ignore the new UI you pretty much can. Is it just the fact that things have changed that causes all the hate or is there some rational explanation that I'm completely missing? You're right the Windows Store is pretty feeble but if you hate it's easy to ignore.

uvTwitch 13y ago

Much of an improvement that Windows 8 is, this doesn't surprise me - There is no -need- to upgrade to it over Windows 7. It's not like the difference between XP and 7, where users were upgrading from an ageing buggy mess (or in the case of upgrades from vista, just a buggy mess).

midnitewarrior 13y ago

I think these numbers are a testament to how good Windows 7 is. There was definitely a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista, but, with Windows 7 being so good, Windows 8 is a tough sell for some consumers. In my experience, Windows 7 has been more stable than Windows 8. For average users, there's no real reason to upgrade.

blinkingled 13y ago

It almost sounds like Microsoft would be better off adopting the Ubuntu model - two consumer releases supported for a shorter period followed by one long term supported Pro release. The consumer release can be priced to sell the pro one can retain today's Windows 8 Pro pricing. The consumer release can push the boundaries in terms of features and experimentation, while the pro release can pickup stabilized Pro centric features and security updates from it. While they are at it they can also deemphasize Metro from the Pro edition, leaving it as a mostly consumer feature.

EEGuy 13y ago

What I'd like to see in the next iteration of Windows is desktop application windows that are /scalable/, as in the "pinch to zoom" on smartphones, but mouseable. On Windows' windows, all four corners presently control clipping. Two of those four could be devoted to scaling instead of clipping. This is something a desktop OS could do to increase my productivity. One desktop /application/, Real VNC Viewer, does this -- and I find it very convenient.