From 'The Official Microsoft Blog' an 'our stats are better than their stats, nyaaargh nyaaargh'
post -
Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, "making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history" - 150,000,000
Projected PC sales in 2010 - 355 million
Projected netbook sales in 2010 - 58 million
Projected iPad sales for 2010 - 7.1 million
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008 - 10
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009 - 96
Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in June 2010 - 10,000 (up from zero in November 2009)
"Number of students, teachers and staff using Microsoft's cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools, the largest cloud deployment in the US" - 700,000 (factoid of the day)
Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, "the largest Microsoft beta program in history" - 9,000,000
Number of new Bing search users in one year - 21.4 million (ah yes, but did they keep searching?)
Global Windows Live Hotmail users - 360 million (versus 284 million global Yahoo! Mail users and 173 million global Gmail users)
Rank of Windows Live Messenger globally compared to all other instant messaging services - 1
Active Windows Live Messenger Accounts worldwide - 299 million
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2000 - US$23.0 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2009 - US$58.4 billion
Microsoft Net Income for fiscal year ending June 2009 - US$14.5 billion
A commentator in the New York Times responded that -
Bing, its search engine, attracted 21.4 million new users in one year, Mr. Shaw says. Very well, but he does not mention the following: in 2007, the company’s online services group lost $604 million; in 2008, $1.2 billion; and in 2009, the year of Bing’s introduction, $2.25 billion.
Mr. Shaw also points out that in its 2000 fiscal year, Microsoft’s revenue was $23 billion, and that it grew to $58.4 billion by 2009. He does not, however, go on to compare this growth with that of Apple and Google, whom he had just called upon to illustrate another point. But let’s call Apple back to the stage: from 2000 to 2009, when Microsoft’s revenue grew 153 percent, Apple’s grew 436 percent. (Google’s number, beginning from a tiny base in 2000, is too large for use as a fair comparison.)
