Microsoft Has Sold 300 Million Windows 7 Licences

[need4speeds]

Do you know how much plastic that is? “Or, to put it another way, if you lined up 300 million Windows 7 product boxes, they would stretch nearly 1.5 times around the Earth,” That is nothing to brag about or be proud of.
If Microsoft sold windows at the same price they sell it to oem's (I think about $40) via a download/key like steam does, they could have prevented this environmental disaster.

To make matters worse today's pricing means microsoft sells win7 to oem's for lets say $40, and the retail oem version is $100, retail versions $140-300.
This means if i wanted to upgrade my board/cpu/os from winxp to win7, if i buy a new e-machines mid-tower like i seen in a recent flyer for $349.99. It is a 1tb/4gb/athlonx4@3.1ghz/dvd-burner. It also comes with win7. So i rob my current 500 watt p/s, case fans, hdd's, any dvd burners, hd-4870 card, sb-live from my current system and put them in the e-machines and i have a x4/4870 system.
Or i buy a board/cpu/mem/os disk for $350 and dont get a new hdd,dvd burner, case?
So the old case ends up in a landfill, also the big cardboard box the e-machines came in, styrofoam packing, plastic bags inside, crummy e-machines keyboard/mouse. I suppose the savings is that the e-machines comes with a disk without the box.

Don't you see how wasteful this is?

 

[beayn]

[citation][nom]need4speeds[/nom]Do you know how much plastic that is? “Or, to put it another way, if you lined up 300 million Windows 7 product boxes, they would stretch nearly 1.5 times around the Earth,” That is nothing to brag about or be proud of. If Microsoft sold windows at the same price they sell it to oem's (I think about $40) via a download/key like steam does, they could have prevented this environmental disaster. To make matters worse today's pricing means microsoft sells win7 to oem's for lets say $40, and the retail oem version is $100, retail versions $140-300. This means if i wanted to upgrade my board/cpu/os from winxp to win7, if i buy a new e-machines mid-tower like i seen in a recent flyer for $349.99. It is a 1tb/4gb/athlonx4@3.1ghz/dvd-burner. It also comes with win7. So i rob my current 500 watt p/s, case fans, hdd's, any dvd burners, hd-4870 card, sb-live from my current system and put them in the e-machines and i have a x4/4870 system. Or i buy a board/cpu/mem/os disk for $350 and dont get a new hdd,dvd burner, case? So the old case ends up in a landfill, also the big cardboard box the e-machines came in, styrofoam packing, plastic bags inside, crummy e-machines keyboard/mouse. I suppose the savings is that the e-machines comes with a disk without the box. Don't you see how wasteful this is?[/citation]
Dude, our whole society is based off wastefulness. It's not just MS contributing to this. Hell, there's even huge parts of the ocean that are filled with swirling pools of floating plastic waste the size of texas. The world would have to change to stop this kind of thing.

 

[TEAMSWITCHER]

[citation][nom]Nexus52085[/nom]The problem is that I can find an $800 laptop that outperforms a $1500 macbook pro ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.[/citation]

My problem is that when I looked at the $800 PC's and they were in the same exact same plastic piece of shit case as the $300 Black Friday laptop. Why the hell can't PC makers provide a quality 1" think all metallic, durable enclosure like the MacBook Pro? And why can't they provide a magnetic power connector, and slot load optical drive? Why can't they provide a high capacity battery that doesn't protrude from the bottom of the case, doubling the thickness and making it impossible to find a matching laptop bag. Why does it have to have a huge power brick and a travel weight 1 pound (or more) than the MacBook Pro? And finally, why are they all so damn ugly?

I'm NOT gonna buy another PC laptop until I see one that at least tries to compete with the MacBook Pro on features, form, and function, and not just price. Inexpensive is the ONLY benefit, everything else is inferior.

 

[TEAMSWITCHER]

[citation][nom]viometrix[/nom]to all you apple fanboys saying pcs are dirt cheap and apples are better cause they cost more, get your head out of your ass like an ostrich in the sand. i have been building pc's for 25 years, and i can state for a fact that i can take any mac desktop and buy the exact same parts (except the case) and build a pc for 1/4 the cost. especially since macs ussually use mostly last gen parts. and funny how if you want to add a high end video card for your mac it costs like 800 dollars when the exact same card in specs (just not made to work in macs strict hitler controls) for pc is about 500. it just proves mac users are brainless lemmings! hopefully steve jobs will die and the people will come to their senses.[/citation]

I understand that there are people who like to build their own computers, its a nice hobby - but I gave up that hobby years ago. For me building a computer would be a complete waste of my time. And my time is far more valuable than the few hundred dollars that I might save. Everything is cheap until something goes wrong, and then you spend more time and more money buying parts to swap out to see if you can fix it - or better yet - mail off parts to companies that support users at tortoise speeds- if at all.

As for your "brainless lemmings" comment, it's just not true. Mac users put more thought into their purchases that the average PC user - they have too, there is more money at stake.

 

[beayn]

[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]My problem is that when I looked at the $800 PC's and they were in the same exact same plastic piece of shit case as the $300 Black Friday laptop. Why the hell can't PC makers provide a quality 1" think all metallic, durable enclosure like the MacBook Pro? And why can't they provide a magnetic power connector, and slot load optical drive? Why can't they provide a high capacity battery that doesn't protrude from the bottom of the case, doubling the thickness and making it impossible to find a matching laptop bag. Why does it have to have a huge power brick and a travel weight 1 pound (or more) than the MacBook Pro? And finally, why are they all so damn ugly?I'm NOT gonna buy another PC laptop until I see one that at least tries to compete with the MacBook Pro on features, form, and function, and not just price. Inexpensive is the ONLY benefit, everything else is inferior.[/citation]

Magnetic power connector falls off too easy. I think Mac has this patented anyway, meaning nobody else can do it. Slot load DVD drives fail eventually, long before a tray load drive. I've had several slot load DVD drives, all of which stopped loading discs after a few years. The key is that Mac users always blow their money on the latest thing and don't have them long enough to notice, OR they aren't power users and rarely *use* their laptop for anything but surfing.

You can nearly always buy longer lasting batteries if you want to fork out the extra cash. I haven't seen one with a protruding battery on standard laptops. You tend to only see those on gaming laptops that require the extra power for the video card that gives 4x the graphics performance as the same priced Macpro.

Why do you insist on a metallic case? Do you plan to drop your laptop often? If so, there are industrial laptop cases designed just for that. Even so, a quick google search found HP Pavilion laptops with a metallic case. If I so desired, I'm sure I could find more. You just have to look. If everyone demanded metallic cases, you'd find them easier. As it is, nobody cares.

There are plenty of thin laptops that compete in size and such to the MacBook. You just refuse to even look for them. If all you want is style rather than performance, then you're a perfect mac customer and that's why you've fallen for their gimmicks hook line and sinker.

On top of this, if any PC maker made a laptop with all the crappy features you just mentioned, you'd be bashing them for "Copying macs and not coming up with anything original on their own." which is typical.

 

[beayn]

[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]I understand that there are people who like to build their own computers, its a nice hobby - but I gave up that hobby years ago. For me building a computer would be a complete waste of my time. And my time is far more valuable than the few hundred dollars that I might save. Everything is cheap until something goes wrong, and then you spend more time and more money buying parts to swap out to see if you can fix it - or better yet - mail off parts to companies that support users at tortoise speeds- if at all.As for your "brainless lemmings" comment, it's just not true. Mac users put more thought into their purchases that the average PC user - they have too, there is more money at stake.[/citation]

I build computers all the time as well. I buy better parts than what goes into your average Walmart computer. All of the computers I build and sell last much longer than those piece of crap name brand systems. You're suggesting that having to buy parts to replace broken ones happens all the time - it doesn't when you buy something better than the lowest bargain piece of crap. And even quality PC parts are half the price of the same Mac parts.

As for your comment about Mac users having to put more thought into their purchases... how much thought is required when there are only a few Mac models on the market to choose from? Apple insists on removing choice to make things easier.

 

[ien2222]

[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]My problem is that when I looked at the $800 PC's and they were in the same exact same plastic piece of shit case as the $300 Black Friday laptop. Why the hell can't PC makers provide a quality 1" think all metallic, durable enclosure like the MacBook Pro? And why can't they provide a magnetic power connector, and slot load optical drive? Why can't they provide a high capacity battery that doesn't protrude from the bottom of the case, doubling the thickness and making it impossible to find a matching laptop bag. Why does it have to have a huge power brick and a travel weight 1 pound (or more) than the MacBook Pro? And finally, why are they all so damn ugly?I'm NOT gonna buy another PC laptop until I see one that at least tries to compete with the MacBook Pro on features, form, and function, and not just price. Inexpensive is the ONLY benefit, everything else is inferior.[/citation]

See, that's the problem with people like you. You tend to value style and aesthetics over function. The function of a laptop is to be a computer. That $800 pc will have a better cpu, gpu, more memory, better hdd and most likely better optical drive than you're $1500 mac. That's what function is. It's like buying a house with a gorgeous facade and interior despite the structure being termite ridden. All the reason's you listed are secondary at best to anyone who needs computational power. That's why there are those the of us who berate you.

If you bought it for the aesthetics that's fine and I'm ok with it as that's a acceptable reason, but don't come here saying it's a the only consideration you should think of, or that mac's are superior computers at the same price point, cause it's clearly not the case.

 

[Guest]

Lol

Nothing to see here. only typical MS sales B.S. Not true actually..
It is very hard to measure the real number of windows 7 computers in use out there.
For sure the forced distribution of windows 7 adds to the false number count out there.
A more realistic figure will be around 100 mil.. this is no small number for sure.. and Hats off to Microsoft. There product is good enough to sell to the masses now. Unfortunately Win 7 does not work with older hardware.. so stick with win98 or XP.

As to comparing Win PC's vs Mac PC's some reality.. if I was to build a PC or Notebook with similar specs.. ( and the crucial build.. QUALITY) then there will be fairly similar prices.
The market however wants cheep. so P.C. people get there piece of cheep hardware that may or may not last a long time.. the price you pay.

As to which one is better. the answer is the best one is the one you are most happy to use. Both have good and bad sides.. ( but that is another forum and argument to cover).

 

[randomizer]

Just jumping into the Macbook Pro vs everything argument...

ThinkPad FTW

 

[idlerp]

[citation][nom]need4speeds[/nom]Do you know how much plastic that is? “Or, to put it another way, if you lined up 300 million Windows 7 product boxes, they would stretch nearly 1.5 times around the Earth,” That is nothing to brag about or be proud of. If Microsoft sold windows at the same price they sell it to oem's (I think about $40) via a download/key like steam does, they could have prevented this environmental disaster. To make matters worse today's pricing means microsoft sells win7 to oem's for lets say $40, and the retail oem version is $100, retail versions $140-300. This means if i wanted to upgrade my board/cpu/os from winxp to win7, if i buy a new e-machines mid-tower like i seen in a recent flyer for $349.99. It is a 1tb/4gb/athlonx4@3.1ghz/dvd-burner. It also comes with win7. So i rob my current 500 watt p/s, case fans, hdd's, any dvd burners, hd-4870 card, sb-live from my current system and put them in the e-machines and i have a x4/4870 system. Or i buy a board/cpu/mem/os disk for $350 and dont get a new hdd,dvd burner, case? So the old case ends up in a landfill, also the big cardboard box the e-machines came in, styrofoam packing, plastic bags inside, crummy e-machines keyboard/mouse. I suppose the savings is that the e-machines comes with a disk without the box. Don't you see how wasteful this is?[/citation]

The 300 million number quoted includes OEM licenses. The product boxes were just an example, they didn't really manufacture 300 million of them. I would be surprised if they sold more than 10 million retail boxed copies. Even most people who build their own PC's buy an OEM copy which just comes in a clear DVD case, which is not thrown away, because you need a place to store the disc. Also, Microsoft does sell Windows 7 on their website with a download only option, no need for packaging or a DVD if you don't want it.

 

[rantoc]

[citation][nom]zybch[/nom]11% in the US ONLY. Worldwide it still is hovering between 4% and 5%.[/citation]

Kinda proves what markets care for shiny factor and which cares about the computational power of their machines!

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]Why the hell can't PC makers provide a quality 1" think all metallic, durable enclosure like the MacBook Pro?[/citation]
A aluminum unibody portable has it's issues, specially overheating issues of both the exterior casing and the cpu/gpu.
[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]And why can't they provide a magnetic power connector, and slot load optical drive?[/citation]
I've seen more non working magsafe chargers than I've seen chargers from any other manufacturer. And in my country mac's are very rare.
There are a few laptops that use slot load optical drives. The reason that they aren't used very regularly it's because they're more expensive and the loading mechanism is way less reliable than a standard one.
[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]Why can't they provide a high capacity battery that doesn't protrude from the bottom of the case, doubling the thickness and making it impossible to find a matching laptop bag. Why does it have to have a huge power brick and a travel weight 1 pound (or more) than the MacBook Pro?[/citation]
Could you please state a laptop which battery protrudes from the bottom. There are laptops with big batteries because they have a powerful CPU/GPU. Also batteries on pcs are bigger because they're exchangeable, so the batteries must have a casing and connectors. And the laptop must also have the the mechanism to fix the battery, connectors, and a casing to prevent access to inwards of the laptop. The up side is that I can use as many batteries that I want and if a battery malfunctions all I need is to buy a new one. In apple's case since the batteries isn't an accessory it's way more expensive to replace, not to mention you have to pay for the intervention on the laptop.
[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]And finally, why are they all so damn ugly?I'm NOT gonna buy another PC laptop until I see one that at least tries to compete with the MacBook Pro on features, form, and function, and not just price. Inexpensive is the ONLY benefit, everything else is inferior.[/citation]
"I'm NOT gonna buy another PC laptop until I see one that at least tries to compete with the MacBook Pro on form and not just price, features and function." There I fixed that for you.

 

[rantoc]

Kinda fun to see the mac'sters try to claim their 1-2 gen old hardware is as good as the latest in win pc's because apple told them soo!

Don't the e-peen feel as large when the old "ignorance is bliss" don't work because of enlightened customers?

 

[mitch074]

I'm not too sure I like Windows 7 - actually, I find it... cramped and slow. Better than Vista (eventhough the latter got much better with SPs and better drivers), but still... slow.

I'm a power user; I have multiple screens, multiple computers, I work on several projects simultaneously, and I multitask a lot.

Still, most of my time is spent debugging web pages and websites, and the softwares I use most are:
- Firefox (with several developer extensions)
- a powered up text editor
- an email client (Thunderbird)
- an IM client + Skype
- a VM running a Debian-based LAMP server (VirtualBox).

You'll notice that all these are rather platform-agnostic.

And, between the Core2 Duo, 2Gb of RAM, Acer laptop I got from work, running a very clean Win7 Pro install, and the poor Acer Aspire (Atom 270+1 Gb of RAM)I often use, the latter runs cirles around the twice/thrice s powerful laptop:
- boots in half the time: 34s from power switch press to loaded desktop and disk activity end (the laptop requires more than a minute)
- at boot, only requires a few seconds to load all the apps simultaneously (whenever I try that on the laptop, I have time to go and make myself some tea).
- the worst part is probably the very lousy networking stack: dropped connections, lost network, unreliable wifi... All make for a rather sorry experience.

Let's add the lack of workspace support on Win7, which makes having several screens mandatory, and I very often feel like kicking Win7 out and installing Ubuntu, or whatever, in its stead.

If only I owned the laptop.

 

[rantoc]

[citation][nom]benjamin pearcy[/nom]Nexus52085"The problem is that I can find an $800 laptop that outperforms a $1500 macbook pro ANY DAY OF THE WEEK."for gaming maybe yes, for anything else...in your dream, dude.[/citation]

Sorry to say this but do you really think your 1 gen old hardware can stand up to the latest cutting edge that the WIN pc's are enjoying (at way better prices too). Speak about dreaming! (sorry the truth hurts your e-peen "dude")

 

[verbalizer]

I wonder how many have been pirated..?

 

[jj463rd]

[citation][nom]gmcd2255[/nom]Lol Nothing to see here. only typical MS sales B.S. Not true actually..It is very hard to measure the real number of windows 7 computers in use out there.For sure the forced distribution of windows 7 adds to the false number count out there.A more realistic figure will be around 100 mil.. this is no small number for sure.. and Hats off to Microsoft. There product is good enough to sell to the masses now. Unfortunately Win 7 does not work with older hardware.. so stick with win98 or XP.As to comparing Win PC's vs Mac PC's some reality.. if I was to build a PC or Notebook with similar specs.. ( and the crucial build.. QUALITY) then there will be fairly similar prices. The market however wants cheep. so P.C. people get there piece of cheep hardware that may or may not last a long time.. the price you pay.As to which one is better. the answer is the best one is the one you are most happy to use. Both have good and bad sides.. ( but that is another forum and argument to cover).[/citation]

"Unfortunately Win 7 does not work with older hardware"

B.S. Windows 7 minimum requirements 1 Ghz x86 processor.
My 10 year old Athlon PC system could run that with just a simple memory upgrade.
Try running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6) on a pre Intel CPU Macs (before summer 2006).No can do.

 

[davewolfgang]

"Unfortunately Win 7 does not work with older hardware"

B.S. Windows 7 minimum requirements 1 Ghz x86 processor.
My 10 year old Athlon PC system could run that with just a simple memory upgrade.
Try running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6) on a pre Intel CPU Macs (before summer 2006).No can do.

You are correct - I've actually found that 7 runs very well on older/lower spec hardware, and sometimes better than XP and especially Vista did.

If you have 1GB of memory - 7 will run just fine. Sure you probably won't have that fancy Aero interface and all the fancy graphic affects (because 7 seems to detect that lower hardware and turns all that off by default) - but the guts will run just fine.

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]gmcd2255[/nom]A more realistic figure will be around 100 mil..[/citation]
I think that Microsoft knows much better than you the number of licenses it has sold to oems, retail and upgrade versions. But I'm curious you base the 100mil number on what fact?
[citation][nom]gmcd2255[/nom]Unfortunately Win 7 does not work with older hardware.. so stick with win98 or XP.[/citation]
I have an old ASUS L5GM which is on it's way 8 years, it has a P4 with 1GB of memory and it's running windows 7 quite nicely. I also have a HP dv1000 that is also running windows 7.
On my iBook G4 that I bought in 2005 I can only install the Mac OS X 10.5.8. So after 4 years I was unable to upgrade the OS to the latest version.
[citation][nom]gmcd2255[/nom]As to comparing Win PC's vs Mac PC's some reality.. if I was to build a PC or Notebook with similar specs.. ( and the crucial build.. QUALITY) then there will be fairly similar prices. The market however wants cheep. so P.C. people get there piece of cheep hardware that may or may not last a long time.. the price you pay.[/citation]
You do know that in almost all studies ASUS is the leader in terms of reliability. Apple usually sits in third place. And what's even more impressive is that ASUS and almost all manufacturers sells quite a lot netbooks and very cheap notebooks that studies shows that are the laptops more prone to failure, yet in total many go head to head with Apple and some even overtake it.

 

[gm0n3y]

[citation][nom]V8VENOM[/nom]300 million is piss in the ocean compared to what Apple sales numbers across their product lines ... given that Microsoft is dead in the water when it comes to hardware.Tom's just refuses to publish the quarterly revenue of Apple vs. Microsoft ... I know it hurts Tom's to see Apple crushing Microsoft financially.[/citation]
Obvious troll is obvious.

 

[Blender3DProjects]

[citation][nom]doron[/nom]Well, no BSODS for me in ages in any desktop / notebook me and my family owns. Unless I try push my desktop too far in ocing but that's just me.[/citation]

Possibly more to do with the hardware than the OS. Most Macs these days are using LED screens, which saves quite a bit of power.

 

[Blender3DProjects]

Abouve comment was meant for a comment about battery usage :\ wrong quote.

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]Blender3DProjects[/nom]Most Macs these days are using LED screens, which saves quite a bit of power.[/citation]
So does most notebooks from other manufacturers. Even the ASUS EEE PC R105 that is perhaps the cheapest netbook on sale has a LED LCD screen.

 

[eddieroolz]

Good to see W7 sales go strongly still. Not long until we finally get to ditch the dying dinosaur that is XP.

 

[beayn]

[citation][nom]Blender3DProjects[/nom]Possibly more to do with the hardware than the OS. Most Macs these days are using LED screens, which saves quite a bit of power.[/citation]

Why are people so obsessed with saving power? The power savings from an LED or LCD monitor is like 2 bucks a month.

Buying a mac to save power is like buying a $40,000 electric car to save on gas. The gas will cover the difference you paid outright in about 20 years of use and it won't even last that long.

If you're talking laptop battery power I guess it could add some battery life but for desktops it's pointless.