Looking back at 2011, it was a great year for Windows and for Microsoft. We began 2011 with a little over 240 million licenses sold of Windows 7. Since then, we’ve seen incredible momentum with Windows 7 throughout 2011 (300 million licenses, 350 million licenses, 400 million licenses). As of today, more than half a billion PCs around the world are running Windows 7. The rate of licenses sold continues at more than 7 copies every second! So there are a lot of PCs today running Windows 7. And now more than ever the line-up of Windows 7 PCs is simply amazing spanning across all kinds of form factors – ranging from incredibly powerful gaming PCs, to All-in-Ones, to thin-and-light ultrabooks. Together, with our OEMS and Intel – we’ve driven advances in the chips inside PCs to allow for their designs to be smaller and sleeker without sacrificing power and battery life.
The below video, showing tonight during our CES keynote in Las Vegas, highlights many of the incredible thin-and-light PCs available right now as well as a couple that were just announced today like the HP Envy 14 Spectre ultrabook and next-generation Samsung Series 9 available in a 13 and 15 inch screen! Watch the video!
Right now is the perfect time to get a new Windows PC!
Also in 2011 – we started talking about the new generation of Windows: Windows 8. Windows 8 represents a reimagination of Windows – from the experience down to the chip. With Windows 8, the idea is that you could do everything you need with one device – whether it watching movies or getting work done like email (or writing blog posts like this one!). A Windows PC will be great for everything they need.
At last year’s CES, we announced that Windows 8 will run on System on a Chip (SoC) architectures from Intel, AMD, and ARM and ARM-based systems from partners NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. In June at the D9 Conference we previewed the new user experience for the first time and then later that same day did the same for hardware partners at Computex in Taipei. Then in September at the BUILD conference in front of thousands of developers, we previewed Windows 8 in much greater detail highlighting many of features that will ultimately make Windows 8 great for users and the things developers can take advantage of in their new Metro Style apps. In December, we previewed the Windows Store – an important feature in Windows 8 for buying apps.
And tonight in our CES keynote, Tami Reller – Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer for the Windows and Windows Live Division – previewed Windows 8. On both ARM (on a prototype hardware running a NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip) and x86 (on the Samsung preview device we gave out at BUILD) , Tami demonstrated features in Windows 8 such as the Start screen, Charms, the Windows Store, and Metro-style apps – which will be available across all your Windows 8 PCs and tablets. To see Windows 8 in action for yourself from tonight’s keynote, you’ll be able to check out the CES keynote on-demand here from Microsoft News Center (Tami is introduced at the 01:32:00 mark). You can also read my personal Windows 8 preview here in this blog post from BUILD.
UPDATE 1/13: You can watch Tami’s entire Windows 8 demo from our CES 2012 keynote in the video below!
What Tami showed was just a small preview of what’s to come with Windows 8. There is still much more. Watch for the next milestone of Windows 8 on the path to availability coming in late February.
Keep your eyes on the Windows Experience Blog throughout the week for more from CES!