We take a moment to provide a different kind of Windows update. Rather than providing information on a mechanical Windows update on your personal computer or laptop, we provide a Windows update that includes interesting facts and figures about Microsoft and Windows.
Microsoft increased its research and development funding in fiscal year 2004 by eight percent.
Microsoft has shipped 130 million Windows XP licenses; 70 percent are XP Professional Edition.
PC sales grew three percent in the past year, but Microsoft’s client business grew eleven percent; overall, Microsoft grew thirteen percent year-over-year, thanks largely to Licensing 6.0 and users migrating to XP Pro.
Microsoft said 350 million PCs still run Windows NT or Windows 9x.
Today, thirty-seven percent of developers use Microsoft .NET, compared with thirty-four percent for Java (a year ago the ratio was 25:30).
Microsoft has sold more than 150 million Microsoft Exchange Server seats worldwide.
25 million unique users visit Microsoft Office Online each month.
Microsoft has shipped 9.4 million Xboxes; each customer buys an average of five software titles for the device, and Xbox Live has more than 500,000 paid subscribers.
Microsoft Office System products that aren’t part of the core Office suite earn the company more than $1 billion each year. Microsoft Project alone generated $500 million in revenue in the past year.
Microsoft applied for 1500 patents in fiscal year 2003.
Almost half of the email that goes through Hotmail’s servers–or 2.4 billion messages every day–is spam; in 2001, it was only 8 percent.
Spam costs about a penny to send–and a dollar to receive; Microsoft estimates Spam is a $10 billion-a-year problem for the industry.
MSN Messenger is the largest free Instant Messaging (IM) service on the planet, and more than 9 million people are using the service concurrently at any given time.