Microsoft: 40 million Windows 8 licenses sold so far

Microsoft launched Windows 8 with much fanfare on October 26th and four days later, its CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the company had already sold over 4 million Windows 8 upgrades. Today, Microsoft gave a new update on Windows 8, 32 days after its official release to the public.

The official Windows blog reports that Windows business head Tami Reller stated that Microsoft has now sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses since the launch. Reller made her remarks during an address at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference.

In addition, Microsoft claims, "Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades." The post did not give any specific numbers for comparison. We emailed Microsoft to find out how many of those 40 million Windows 8 licenses were for updates for older PCs and how many were for new PC purchases but a company representative did not provide that kind of breakdown to us.

Microsoft also provides a brief update on the Windows Store aspect of Windows 8. It said:

There were more apps in the Windows Store at launch than any other app store at their launch and since then, the number of apps in the Windows Store has doubled. A number of apps in the Windows Store have crossed the $25,000 revenue mark and the developer keeps 80% of the revenue they make off downloads for the life of their app.

As we reported earlier today, StatCounter claims that, according to their data, Windows 8 is now being used by 2.05 percent of all PC owners in the US and 1.44 percent worldwide.