Tami Reller had a busy day yesterday, even by her standards. The Windows boss was interviewed by a number of media outlets, where she talked about both Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface tablets.
Continuing her interview circuit, the CFO of the Windows division even appeared in an in-house Q&A session at Microsoft, where she answered a number of questions regarding the company’s latest operating system.
She confirmed that Microsoft is testing how people react to Windows 8 the first time around, and results show that majority of people catch on with the OS pretty quickly:
“Fifty percent of users get through the out of box experience in less than 5 minutes. On the very first day, virtually everyone launches an app from the Start screen, finds the desktop, and finds the charms. Almost half of users go to the Windows Store on that first day.
After two weeks, the average person doubles the number of tiles on Start. Live tiles engage people with content – by early January we had already delivered over 45 billion unique live tile updates.”
Not many surprises here, considering how polished — changed, yes, but polished, nevertheless — the interface of Windows 8 is. Most people will find their way around within the first hour or so.
Reller was coy on numbers, though, and repeated what Microsoft has already confirmed. 60 million Windows 8 licenses have been sold, and more than 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Windows Store.
