Microsoft announced late Tuesday that it had sold 40 million licenses of its touch-centric Windows 8 software, which Microsoft said put Windows 8 on track to be more popular than Windows 7, the company’s preceding and more traditional point-and-click operating system, which had sold 600 million licenses globally as of June 2012 but sold 60 million in its first two months of release back in 2009, as ZDNet reported.
Windows 8 launched on October 25 but has received mixed reviews from critics and consumers, perhaps to be expected, given the software’s enormous departure from previous versions of Windows (gone is the familiar desktop, taskbar, and “Start” button, which have been siloed into a desktop app. These are replaced with a series of “live tiles,” interlocking square buttons that link to apps and display information.)