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

First 15 months sales:<p>* Windows 8: 200 million<p>* Windows 7: 300 million<p>* Windows Vista: ~128 million<p>* Windows XP: ~120 million (based on an IDC estimate, as Microsoft released few early sales figures for XP).<p>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&#x27;d also work in 7, computers that would&#x27;ve been sluggish in Vista could easily run 7, and the price of the OS was slashed.<p>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&#x27;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.

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.<p>I&#x27;m glad Microsoft is backtracking on this. What they did was bold, but the product they forced down everyone&#x27;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&#x27;s the only one I use and it bugs me that I can&#x27;t put it on the desktop somewhere. I just want metro to go away forever.<p>Luckily under the hood is still that vaunted desktop Windows from old. It just needs to come back as soon as possible.

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.<p>Windows 8 is a customer-hostile mess that adds very little to the Windows 7 formula.

Kind of misleading. Let us not forget that people were coming from the shitshow that was Vista (before all the service packs &#x2F; hotfixes were applied) or XP if they didn&#x27;t get Vista. The latter made people long overdue for an overhaul.

Well there is also no need to upgrade for a lot of people. A dual core&#x2F;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.

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

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.<p>In my experience, Windows 7 has been more stable than Windows 8. For average users, there&#x27;s no real reason to upgrade.

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&#x27;s Windows 8 Pro pricing.<p>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.<p>While they are at it they can also deemphasize Metro from the Pro edition, leaving it as a mostly consumer feature.

What I&#x27;d like to see in the next iteration of Windows is desktop application windows that are &#x2F;scalable&#x2F;, as in the &quot;pinch to zoom&quot; on smartphones, but mouseable.<p>On Windows&#x27; windows, all four corners presently control clipping. Two of those four could be devoted to scaling instead of clipping.<p>This is something a desktop OS could do to increase my productivity. One desktop &#x2F;application&#x2F;, Real VNC Viewer, does this -- and I find it very convenient.

Much of an improvement that Windows 8 is, this doesn&#x27;t surprise me - There is no -need- to upgrade to it over Windows 7. It&#x27;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).

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

Whatever the larger significance, surely these sales figures represent billions of lost dollars (or dollars not earned) for Microsoft?<p>EDIT: to downvoters - I&#x27;m just assuming that Microsoft make at least tens of dollars per licence sold. Am I wrong?