I find that hard to believe! Even though 7 is the best MS OS so far but it can't reach that insane number so fast. I mean most laptops I see are still using the old XP
Keep in mind these are not retail sales, most of that money is coming from Wholesale customers (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc). For all we know half of these 100 million machines are still sitting in warehouses, with paid for licenses. Apart from sales.microsoft.com they do very little direct selling to end-users. Not to mention that any new computer leases by corporations using downgrade rights to run XP VLK are required to pay for a Windows 7 license to do so. That is a limitation of the VLK licensing scheme. So I believe they reached 100 million units, but many of those are still sitting on shelves, or have been downgraded to XP by large corporations. My guess is in 12 months when XP downgrade rights cease, that they will be extended (under pressure from numerous fortune 500 companies to extend XP in the office)
Why is everyone so surprise by the sales of Windows 7? It is BY FAR the best operating system Microsoft has released since Windows 2000. It is stable and has great features that make it easy to use. It is everything Vista should have been and more. If you look at the OEM PC market, HP, Dell, ASUS, ACER, Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba are all selling tons of hardware because people are buying into the Windows 7 buzz. I think it's a good thing because when Microsoft has a hit, it drives profits for all of the OEMs and they employ a lot of people in China.
This is prob from all the ones stuck on the shelves like everybody is saying cause the economy sux at the moment cause it takes a little while to recover from a mini-depression (or whatever you wanna call it). As for china I really don't like what happens there and I'd like to be able to buy american goods its just soo difficult to do so (I'm getting off topic). Most of the profits are because MS is in bed with the Chinese Communist party. Please keep in mind that China is still a communist country and I doubt thats going to change anytime soon.