Right Now, There Are 1.25 Billion Windows PCs Worldwide
Microsoft is in San Francisco this evening, showing off the upcoming Windows Store built into Windows 8.
As part of their pitch to developers, Windows Web Services VP Antoine Leblond threw out some stats to show how enormous the Windows installed base.
1.25 billion Windows PCs running today. (That includes all versions of Windows.)
500 million Windows 7 licenses sold in the last two years. It's a safe bet that more than 80% of those licenses were sold on new PCs, which means there are at least 400 million active Windows 7 users today. (Some licenses might have been bought by corporations for upgrades, but not yet deployed.)
That compares with:
234 million Android phones and 13 million Android tablets (as per IDC), for a total of 247 million Android devices.
112 million iPhones and 40 million iPads, leading to 152 million iOS devices.
This is only an apples-to-apples comparison if ALL Windows apps in the store are as quick and easy to download and install as they are on iOS and Android.
It looks like the Windows Metro (tablet-style) apps will be quick to install. But traditional Windows apps often take several minutes to install, and unless Microsoft has some as-yet-unannounced big changes to its installation technology, that's probably not going to change much.
Another caveat: the installed base of Windows 8 as of today is 0. It probably won't be out until next fall.
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