XP sold 120 million in the same time period. Care to explain your view?

In 2001 the PC install base was less than a 10th of what it is today. Raw sales are kind of a terrible comparison. Relevant to MS's revenue, sure, but not a good means of comparison. The better comparison would be the relative market share. I haven't seen numbers, but I would guess that XP's market share was substantially better than W8's over the same duration, even if only considering PCs operating on Windows.

I'm kind of curious about that number and how it was obtained. Do you have a link? I couldn't find anything good.

I am going to have to recant I guess. Quickly looking through the IDC, Gartner, World Bank and Strategy Analytics numbers, I can't find something to cite. If you look at global device shipment numbers from 1996 - 2013 and plot shipments per year with a 5 year tailing use to estimate the user base (which seems the norm for the PC user base values) it seems like 15-20% would be closer to the average, not 10% like I stated. I doubt it's important enough to either of us to spend the time to it. ;)

I did a quick check right now and couldn't find it either (always easy to find shipment numbers, but not user base). I am pretty sure it was an IDC or Gartner chart that I saw that showed worldwide pc users per year. Let me do some checking this afternoon when I have more free time and will post a link.