CNN ran a story last week calling Microsoft a “dying consumer brand”. No way. With products like Windows 7 that have been on the market for the last year and Windows Phone 7 and Kinect hitting the market soon — I of course have to disagree. But my opinion is pretty biased. Frank Shaw, however, has started up a new hashtag on Twitter called #notdeadyet with a series of tweets highlighting some pretty eye-opening numbers regarding Microsoft. Here are some of what’s been highlighted:
- More than 240 million licenses of Windows 7 sold — fastest selling OS in history.
- 1 billion “entertainment hours” spent on Xbox Live each month — see more interesting Xbox stats from Major Nelson.
- Microsoft had a 51% jump in profit for Q1 FY 2011.
- For the 4th month in a row, Xbox 360 is top selling game console.
- Halo Reach had $200 million in sales in U.S. and Europe in first 24 hours — biggest Microsoft game in history.
And of course in September we also released the new version of Windows Live Essentials which includes new versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mesh (previously Sync), and Family Safety. Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 here. Here are some interesting data tidbits about Windows Live my pal Dharmesh published in a blog post last week:
- 300 million active Messenger users.
- Mesh is syncing over 500 terabytes of data between PCs (wow!).
- 360 million active Hotmail users.
- Hotmail delivers 8 billion email messages daily.
Over the summer, we also released Office Web Apps where you can edit and create Microsoft Office documents, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets online through Windows Live!
And in September we also launched the beta of Internet Explorer 9. As of this week, the IE9 Beta has been downloaded 10 million times making it the fastest adopted browser beta. If you haven’t already, you can download the IE9 Beta here.
I also highly recommend reading Frank Shaw’s blog post on the official Microsoft Blog from June called Microsoft by the numbers for further perspective.
Microsoft is not dead yet.