I must admit, I haven’t been the largest fan of Microsoft products and policies. (With the exclusion of Visual Studio and the .NET and XNA platforms.. and Silverlight and Excel…)

However, it’s very easy to jump on the “anti-MS bandwagon” and media hype depicting “The Fall of Microsoft” is inaccurate and biased… accordingly, very recently, it seems as though MS has responded with some press of their own –> The Official Microsoft Blog.

My first PC was a Windows 95 P2 233mhz 2GB HD with 16MB of RAM (yes that’s slower than your phone). I had big goals even then, so like all great machine sidekicks I gave it a nickname – “blue” (unfortunately KITT was taken).

At the time I did not realize this name was more fitting than I’d imagined and the PC spent much time exhibiting a memorable blue screen…

These “blue screen” events often precluded tasks which involved many hours of hard work such as writing a paper or during the final moments of a long online session of C&C:Red Alert.

Like many great frustrations, I would later look back and laugh at these moments, especially once I saw it made such a great t-shirt.

hi blue

Aside from these incidents we all know as BSOD, the OS was relatively stable considering the large support for applications, drivers and games. Mac OS was a valid alternative, but in many cases was much more expensive and most other options at the time did not support as much hardware or plug and play, major game releases and many other software applications. Combine this with a distinct visual GUI with very few comparisons on the market, and the drive behind MS is obvious from the start.

MS has at times found it’s policies as the target for concern with anti-competitive practices raising flags around the globe. (European Union Microsoft Competition Case). Although this is in no way justified, it seems most large corporations at some point or another are accused of monopolistic tactics. (To see what I mean, just do a search for insert company name here —> “_______ monopolistic”).

Recently, I’ve come across some information which shouldn’t come as a surprise, but exemplifies just how powerful MS really is.

As of June 2010, take a look at the following information released from Frank Shaw – head of MS communications.

The Numbers:

150,000,000
Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.

7.1 million
Projected iPad sales for 2010.

58 million
Projected netbook sales in 2010.

355 million
Projected PC sales in 2010.

0
Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in November 2009.

10,000
Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in June 2010.

700,000
Number of students, teachers and staff using Microsoft’s cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools, the largest cloud deployment in the US.

16 million
Total subscribers to largest 25 US daily newspapers.

14 Million
Total number of Netflix subscribers.

23 million
Total number of Xbox Live subscribers.

21.4 million
Number of new Bing search users in one year.

24%
Linux Server market share in 2005.

33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005).

21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009.

8.8 million
Global iPhone sales in Q1 2010.

21.5 million
Nokia smartphone sales in Q1 2010.

55 million
Total smartphone sales globally in Q1 2010.

439 million
Projected global smartphone sales in 2014.

9
Number of years it took Salesforce.com to reach 1 million paid user milestone.

6
Number of years it took Microsoft Dynamics CRM to reach 1 million paid user milestone.

100%
Percent chance that Salesforce.com CEO will mention Microsoft in a speech, panel, interview, or blog post.

173 million
Global Gmail users.

284 million
Global Yahoo! Mail users.

360 million
Global Windows Live Mail users.

299 million
Active Windows Live Messenger Accounts worldwide.

$5.7 Billion
Apple Net income for fiscal year ending Sep 2009.

$6.5 Billion
Google Net income for fiscal year ending Dec 2009.

$14.5 Billion
Microsoft Net Income for fiscal year ending June 2009.

$23.0 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2000.

$58.4 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2009.

Apple has taken the market share (and boosted my stock earnings as well, thank-you Jobs), however, the truth we see here is obvious – Microsoft was and still is a giant, and will likely continue to grow for quite a long time.

References:

“The Fall of Microsoft”, ComputerWorld http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_fall_of_microsoft

“Decoding Microsoft’s Fantastic Passive-Agressive Numbers Post”, TechCrunch. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

Wikipedia. European Union Microsoft Competition Case, BSOD, KITT, C&C:Red Alert

“The Official Microsoft Blog”, http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25/microsoft-by-the-numbers.aspx