Windows 8 goes past the 100m mark as SkyDrive hits 250m users

Microsoft has sold more than 100-million installs for Windows 8 since it became generally available and claims to have over 250-million users on its cloud-based storage service SkyDrive.

In an official blog post, the Redmond-based giant’s chief marketing officer and chief financial officer Tami Reller confirmed that the OS had reached the 100-million mark, up from 60-million licenses sold by January.

Those 40-million extra licenses, she explains, come largely from the PC market, with the “vast majority” shipping on new PCS. “Windows 8 is a big, ambitious change”, she says, “While we realize that change takes time, we feel good about the progress since launch, including what we’ve been able to accomplish with the ecosystem and customer reaction to the new PCs and tablets that are available now or will soon come to market”. She also noted that some 2 400 devices now ship with Windows 8.

Reller thinks that the PC market isn’t so much dying as evolving and that tablets and other mobile devices should be considered a part of it:

The PC is very much alive and increasingly mobile. The PC is also part of a much broader device market of tablets and PCs. Windows 8 was built to fully participate in this broader and increasingly mobile device market. The PC part of the market is rapidly evolving to include new convertible devices and amazing new touch laptops, and all-in-ones. These new PCs are hitting the market now and into the Back-to-School season, and they are more affordable than ever.

That said, it hasn’t always done particularly well at keeping up with that evolution and took a fair portion of the blame for the dire shape the desktop PC market currently finds itself in.

In the post, she also reveals that there are over 700-million active Microsoft accounts, while the company earlier announced that there were over 250-million people using SkyDrive, its cloud-based storage service. That’s not bad given that just 50-million people were using it when Windows 8 shipped in October last year.

Reller also confirmed that Windows Blue, the codename for the next update to Windows 8, would go live “later this year”. The update, she claims, will “deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem. It will provide more options for businesses, and give consumers more options for work and play”.