Yesterday, Tami Reller brought some enlightenment about Windows 8 at a technology conference in Arizona. You can see the Microsoft post here.  Everyone is talking about the 40M licenses sold, and attempting to correlate to our performance. That’s understandable – but there are more tidbits in there additionally worth considering:

• “More apps in the Windows Store at launch than any other app store at their launch”
• “since then [the launch], the number of apps in the Windows Store has doubled”
• “A number of apps in the Windows Store have crossed the $25,000 revenue mark “, which is good news for some developers because their rev split was just enhanced to 80/20. Cha ching!
• “A lot of great new apps have been added to the Windows Store since launch such as CBS, ABC News, ABC Family, Engadget, Flixster, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), Vimeo and my (current) personal favorite - Top Gear.”  Well – whatever. Those are nice, but my list is different. The good news is that nice app’s await, and more are on the way.

As this news spreads through the technology news engines, it’s interesting to see the interpretation and comments coming out (a few that I don’t see in the Microsoft post). NOTE: I can only fully trust that the Microsoft posts are accurate. Following on from here, I don’t know if these news items are 100% fact – but they are interesting. After seeing the press and MSFT hater beat up our name, I’m glad to see some positive news come out and I hope these positive excerpts below are true.

For example, a related CNET article by Mary Jo Foley had several interesting comments:

• How does this compare to Windows 7 sales? Microsoft said it had sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses from the end of October 2009, its launch date, to the end of December 2009. So that's 60 million Windows 7 licenses sold in two months. So far, Microsoft has sold 40 million licenses of Windows 8 in one month.
• Microsoft now has certified 1,500 PCs and tablets for Windows 8, up from the 1,000 devices it had certified a month ago at launch
• Reller said that users are finding Windows 8 "easy to understand and embrace." She said users are exploring Windows 8 and enjoying learning it, from Day One.  Based on customer feedback and information gathered by Microsoft's customer support organization, "We do know that customers do, indeed, 'get' the product," she said.

In an article from Softpedia, they lightly cover this announcement, but another prevailing item is mentioned:

“What’s more, the company has revealed a pretty interesting thing: Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades, Microsoft said without providing official stats on the number of upgrades”. This is good news because that means that our bet towards our existing customers is working, as well as moving the Windows ecosystem forward with new machines like the Microsoft Surface.

In an article from Computerworld, Joab Jackson had several more interesting comments:

• "We believe Windows 8 is shaping up is as one of the company's most successful products," said Tami Reller
• Outlook.com, a relaunch of the company's Hotmail service, has attracted 25 million users. This is not Windows 8 related, but it’s still nice to know that the new email system and interfaces are attracting customers.
• Since the launch, Microsoft has logged over 1.5 billion impressions of users deploying the start screen through remote telemetry. "So we know this is home base for customers, as we intended it to be," she said.
• Customers are also personalizing the start screen. Within the first three weeks, customers on average added 19 tiles to the ones that are already installed on the system.
• 90% of customers use the charms, which are OS features such as search and share that can be run within different apps. They use these charms on average two to three times each time they run the device.
• Over 85% use the desktop during their first use and approximately half visit the app store.
• The number of apps in the store has doubled since the OS launch.
• Several apps have already been downloaded more than a million times.

That’s all good news!

And another item, that came out from the Computerworld article and others, points out where the reporters wanted to know more about the Sinofsky departure:

• During the question-and-answer period, the moderator asked how the departure of Sinofsky will affect Windows development. Reller responded that the Windows team has a work ethic that does not rely on any one leader. "The team, holistically, is in great, great shape," she said.