Turn the clock back one year and on this day many of us would have been waiting with bated breath for our pre-ordered copies of Windows 7 to finally arrive.
Now, though, on the first birthday of Windows 7's release, the latest from Redmond has proved to be a resounding success and has established itself as the fastest selling operating system to date. To mark the occasion, Microsoft has announced that an impressive 240 million licences have now been sold, which - coincidently - works out to a little over seven every second.
The company has also revealed a few quite interesting statistics to demonstrate the uptake of the OS. Apparently, 93 per cent of all new consumer PCs now ship with some flavour of Windows 7, which has helped it to capture 17 per cent of the global OS market. Within six months of launch, each of the company's OEM partners - more than 18,000 in total - had begun selling systems with the new OS, compared to only around 70 percent for Vista after a similar period.
It should come as a surprise to no-one - at least no-one that has used the OS - that Windows 7 is selling well, and as businesses begin to migrate to it, adoption is likely to increase even faster. It will therefore be interesting to see how many licences Microsoft manages to sell by the operating system's second birthday.
In a related - though completely coincidental - announcement, Microsoft has launched the Windows Product Scout to help users looking to upgrade check whether software and devices will be compatible with the OS. Though the Silverlight-powered interface is very pretty, a quick search for some commonly used software (Filezilla, Pidgin, Gimp, Chrome, Firefox) and several devices within arms reach (Blackberry, Fuji digital camera, Creative Zen) all returned no results. The idea seems to be a good one, but the implementation seems to be somewhat lacking at the moment, making the site less than useful.