Microsoft Corp said it sold 100 million licenses for its latest operating system, and that it will introduce an update to the company’s flagship product in time for the year-end holiday shopping season.
The number of Windows 8 sales since the software’s debut in October last year is in the “general ballpark” with the previous version during a similar period, Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft’s Windows division, said in an interview last week.
Microsoft completely overhauled Windows to make it more appealing to users amid a shift to mobile, touch-based computing. Still, Windows 8 has failed to reignite the ailing PC market. PC shipments plummeted by their largest margin on record in the latest quarter, according to market-research firm IDC.
IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell questioned whether the 100 million milestone accurately reflects the number of operating systems in use.
“I don’t know what that license number means,” O’Donnell said in an interview. “Talk to the PC guys and ask how they’re doing. I talk to them, and I’m not getting anything like that from them.”
Reller declined to say how many of Microsoft’s Surface tablets have been sold, or the total number of devices, including those made by other manufacturers, that are running Windows. Surface is the first computing device designed and sold by Microsoft as the company challenges Apple Inc’s iPad and other tablet computers.
During the first quarter, Microsoft shipped just 900,000 Surfaces and there are a total of 1.8 million tablet devices running Windows 8 or a related version, Windows RT, giving it less than 2 percent of the market, IDC said last week.
Customers’ response to Surface’s software and applications has been “less positive” than the reaction to the tablet, Reller said. The company has fixed Surface’s e-mail program and has made other applications easier to use, and is trying to attract more top third-party programs.
The next update to Windows, code-named Blue, will be released later this year, Reller said. Microsoft will begin talking about Blue’s features in the next several weeks, and will address customer demands to restore design features such as the Windows Start button and Start menu, Reller said.
While the Blue upgrade will restore the Start button, it will not restore the menu, Verge reported last month.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day