It’s been an exciting day for Windows with lots of news shared. I did however want to take a few minutes to share with you a bit more about the rest of the Windows story and the things we will be talking about this week at CES.
At last year’s CES, it was just a little over 2 months after the launch of Windows 7 and we saw a lot of early excitement from customers for Windows 7 and Windows PCs. At CES this year, Windows 7 is a little over a year old now and the excitement continues with over 240 million licenses sold – selling over 7 copies a second. Windows 7 now represents almost 20% of all PCs connected to the Internet. That’s amazing.
And we haven’t stopped working to deliver innovation to Windows 7 customers – further improving their Windows PC and providing the best place to experience the modern Web.
In September, we launched the beta for Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 9 enables developers to use the combination of HTML5 and great hardware to create amazing and modern web experiences. 20 million people have downloaded the IE9 Beta. If you haven’t yet tried the IE9 Beta, you can do so by heading over to the Beauty of the Web website where you can download the beta and check out examples of how developers are building a “more beautiful” web with HTML5. IE9 also provides seamless integration with Windows 7 by allowing people to “pin” their most favorite websites to their Taskbar. Try pinning The Windows Blog to your Taskbar!
Also in September, we shipped new Windows Live services and products to 500 million people. That includes the new Hotmail and Windows Live Essentials 2011. Hotmail is the #1 email service worldwide. The new Hotmail integrates Office Web Apps right in and just within the first 100 days – more than 20 million people were using Office Web Apps through Hotmail! With Windows Live Essentials 2011, people can create, connect and share with their PC to the cloud. With Windows Live Messenger, people can connect easily with Facebook to see what their friends are up to and even chat with friends on Facebook. Windows Live Messenger is already the #2 app on Facebook today. Windows Live Photo Gallery lets people sync their photos from all their devices including their Windows Phone 7 phones, and share them easily whether it’s on SkyDrive or in an email message via Hotmail or Facebook. Millions of people are connected to the cloud with their Windows 7 PC and Windows Live.
We’re hard at work on making sure we continue to deliver innovation. We’ve got the Release Candidate (RC) of Internet Explorer 9 coming in early 2011. And earlier today, we gave a little sneak peek at work we’re doing on the next generation Windows operating system.
If you missed the Microsoft CES Keynote with Steve Ballmer tonight, you can watch it on-demand on the official Microsoft Facebook page. And be sure to keep tabs on the Windows Experience Blog. Ben the PC Guy will be taking you behind-the-scenes at CES this year and on the exhibit floor visiting hardware partners and shooting videos. He’ll be showing you a bunch of new stuff from our hardware partners. Be sure you follow @BenThePCGuy and @WindowsBlog on Twitter for the latest updates. And for all the latest on Microsoft’s announcements from CES be sure to check out the CES page on Microsoft News Center.