By Peter Galli
REDMOND, Wash.— Microsoft Windows will run more PCs than there are cars in the world by the end of Microsoft's fiscal year 2008, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer July 26 at the company's analyst day here.
The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple, and is well on the way to reaching 1 billion Windows users by the end of the fiscal year, Ballmer and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner told analysts and reporters. The latest number includes 40 million copies sold in the first 100 days of the product's January release.
"The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion," Ballmer told the group. "If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept."