Today is the launch of Windows 8. It will be GA tomorrow (26th October), and MSFT stores are opening at midnight to sell FPP (fully packaged product for “upgrading” existing installs) and Surface.
Steven Sinofsky, the man behind the reimagining of Windows and the way that was done, comes out to kick things off. 670 Million licenses of Windows 7 have been sold to businesses and consumers. Temper that with half of businesses are still deploying Windows XP (end of life in April 2014) and they often downgrade from their entitled Windows 7 licenses.
16 million installs of Windows 8 pre-RTM editions were done. 650 pages of blog posts on Windows 8 were done by Microsoft. That’s about 10 trillion words.
3 announcements:
- Upgrade FPP of Windows 8 will be available in stores and online
- Windows Store is “live” (it has been for a while)
- New Windows RT devices will be available overnight for the first time (genuinely).
Windows 8 is built on the solid foundation of Windows 7. A Windows 7 logo machine will have improvements: 36% boot time, 13% battery, up to 22% memory, and compatibility with Windows 7 logo hardware and software (if the software doesn’t do stupid checks).
I’m not counting the pre-release testing because there was no beta or RC feedback program outside of TAP. No, the Answers forum does not count IMO.
1,000 new PCs are certified for Windows 8 – that’s counting all the variations of models. I am not buying what he’s selling when he says many of these devices cost under $300.
Mike Angiulo comes out to demo Windows 8. The old Windows 7 slate PC (similar to Build one) makes an appearance. It’s very demo friendly because of the dock which features RJ45 networking (no unreliable wifi required) and full sized HDMI port (mini HDMI is loose fitting in most devices I’ve seen).
Heh … the first new Win 8 device picked up was an Acer. Trying to make friends again? Reconnect to wifi is an average of 1 second instead of 15 seconds in Windows 7. The Sony TAP 20 AiO got a quick show – I got to demo it before it’s announcement. We loved it as a family machine – it’s a portable touch PC with a 3 hour battery.
Out comes Steve Ballmer. He’s excited, apparently. Some repetition here, with a mix of Bing and IE10.
670,000,000 PCs out there to be upgraded or replaced. 400,000,000 a year being bought. That’s a lot of Windows 8 PCs going to be bought next year and a big market for app developers to pay attention to.
And that was that.