Microsoft Sold 350M Windows 7 Licenses

Microsoft Inc has announced that it has sold 350 million licenses of Windows 7 so far, making it the hottest selling OS developed by the tech giant.

In April 2010, the company had sold exactly 100 million Windows 7 licenses, according to ZDNet.

Analyst firm IDC estimated that more than 90% of businesses are currently in migrating over to Windows 7 OS and that 68 percent of 517 million shipments (overall PC sales) in 18 months were with Windows 7 licenses while Vista only contributed to 45 per cent (out of 400 million shipments) of sales.

Windows 7 was launched in October 2009, just a couple of years after Windows Vista OS was launched. Windows 7 introduced a bunch of new features including better performance on PCs with multi-core processors, support for more languages, touch and handwriting recognition, virtual hard disk support as well as an improved kernel and the Quick Launch toolbar was replaced by pins to the task bar.

Microsoft claims companies who have deployed Windows 7 save an average of $140 per PC per year showing a 131% return on investment in just more than 12 months.

Microsoft has also launched Windows Live Wave 4 (which includes Windows Live Essentials 2011 and enhancements to Hotmail), and released the first service pack for Windows 7. It also launched the latest version of its web browser Internet Explorer 9 recently and went on to release the developer preview for IE 10.