Microsoft has given figures on how many applications have been downloaded in the last year in its store. Specifically they would be 250 million downloads from the Windows Store. The figure is shocking because of the brutality of the number. The figure is offered in the section of its website Microsoft by the numbers, where the company's achievements are expressed in figures displayed in mosaics reminiscent of the main screen of its current OS.
However, there we can also obtain additional data that puts into context the value of the figure that we gave you in the first instance. Microsoft has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in the last year, this means that each potential user, one for each license, has downloaded 2,5 applications on average in the entire year.
Seen like this, the results are not really promising. Although the truth is that many of these licenses are for PCs and many of its users do not use the Metro-based interface and install third-party programs and applications as they have done all their lives on their personal computers.
If we compare it with the first year of the iOS App Store, we will see that 1.500 million applications were downloaded among the 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch that were sold. This gave an average of 37 applications per user downloaded during the year.
This data may concern those of Redmond, not so much for the health as a platform in terms of the PC, but for the attractiveness that the platform has for the developers of applications for the touch interface. In short, if users continue to use Windows as usual, why invest in touch versions?
In the long run this can be a problem given that touch interfaces are an unappealable reality and a turning point in the development of the industry.
Source: Tab times
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