According to dancing fool and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the software giant is on track to break the one billion user mark by the end of the corporation's fiscal year in 2008. Ballmer spoke at Microsoft's analyst day yesterday, announcing the sale of 60 million copies of Windows Vista to date, and apparently couldn't resist another fresh, interesting, and applicable comparison between computers and automobiles.
"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.

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner was also on hand to reinforce the fact that Vista is, according to Redmond, the most secure operating system Microsoft has ever shipped, with only 12 vulnerabilities reported over the first 180 days (compared to 25 for Windows XP in the same period), and 21 percent fewer support calls for Vista vs. XP, again over the same period. As Eweek's article details, Vista's degree of application and device support are also excellent, and the OS contributed $1.9 billion dollars of revenue towards Microsoft's bottom line thus far in fiscal year 2007.
ars technica