Bangalore: Microsoft has sold 60 million licenses and upgrades of its flagship Windows 8 OS in the first 10 weeks of its launch, one of the top executive of the company’s Windows 8 unit said at CES event in Las Vegas, TOI reports.     

According to Tami Reller, chief financial officer of the Windows division, Windows 8 sales are in line with those of its predecessor Windows 7 operating system that was launched in 2009.

The latest Windows 8 sales figure indicates that around 20 million Windows 8 licenses and upgrades were sold since November end, when Microsoft had announced about 40 million sales in the first month on the market.

The sales figures definitely puts the new offering by Redmond based company in line with Windows 7, which averaged 19.4 million sales per month in its first nine months on the market, when PC sales were running at a lower level than today. Though the figures may sound solid, it did not help to revive the plunging PC sales and also the new touch screen Windows devices, be it Smartphones or tablets, which have not been the flavors of the consumers yet.

However Reller did not shed more light on how many of the Windows 8 sales were bulk orders from PC manufacturers and did not break out the proportion of full license sales and cheaper upgrades from earlier versions of Windows. And she also did not comment on how many Surface tablets, which Microsoft brought in as iPad competitor had been sold.

The final figures of PC sales in 2012 which is to be released next week are expected to show the year on year decline in the sales as the consumers move towards mobile computing like Smartphone and tablets. Microsoft’s app based and touch friendly Windows 8 OS is an attempt by the company to gain mileage to that shift. 

Microsoft shares fell 0.5 percent on the Nasdaq on Tuesday and were down by 6 percent since the launch of Windows 8 on October 26.

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