In just 21 days, Windows 8 will be available to people worldwide. And we’re excited! To celebrate, we have several events taking place in cities all around the world. Just a few weeks ago, we held a coding marathon with developers in Bangalore, India – which set the Guinness World Record for Most Participants in a Software Development Marathon in One Location with 2,567 developers coding non-stop for 18 hours. Coming up, there are launch events happening in cities around the world including Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, New York City and many more. Our event in New York City promises to offer an opportunity to celebrate the launch of Windows 8. And earlier today, we began sending out invites (below). Don’t worry, if you didn’t get an invite we’ll be doing a live webcast of the event too! More details to come.
Across all the milestones we’ve announced for this reimagined version of the world’s best-selling operating system – Windows 8 is the most widely used and tested pre-release product we’ve ever delivered. Across every audience, Windows 8 has been downloaded and used by more people than Windows 7 during the same period. A billion hours of feedback telemetry has been collected from all our pre-releases combined. Since BUILD a year ago, there have been more than 750 Windows developer events held in over 50 countries worldwide – and more than 200,000 developers have attended those events.
Since RTM’ing, our OEM channel has been hard at work preparing over 800 unique systems that have now been certified specifically for Windows 8 and Windows RT. You can check out many of those new designs in this blog post from Nick Parker who runs Microsoft’s OEM division.
On to October 26th!