Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bombcar

Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year.

Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.

View on HN

3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales).

I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.

Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year.

Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year.

These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.

Yeah those don't match parent's comment.

Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com