There’s a very recent interview with Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for  Windows (and émigré from Fargo), talking about the sale of 100 million licenses, up from 60 million in January. The Q&A - with a link off Microsoft’s home page, it’s that big a deal – says “We feel good about the progress since launch, including what we’ve been able to accomplish with the ecosystem and customer reaction to the new PCs and tablets that are available now or will soon come to market.” Not sure the comments amount to the humbling sung of by headlines, but it is rare to defend a product that’s been on the market for months with so much corporate firepower An article by Gary Krakow on “The Street" says, “that an increasing number of customers are now asking if they can still get Windows 7 on the new computers. They don't want Windows 8”. He dismisses the numbers cited by Reller, saying they show a slowdown. In its March quarter earnings call, Microsoft had talked about a Code Blue upcoming Windows release almost as a new product. Krakow calls it Windows 8.1, an upgrade. Sounds more like a big patch. It would be nice, the thought occurs, if Microsoft could not sell the OS on new computers and had to sell it separately and we could get a true market reaction. As to my own experience - I'm president of a nonprofit group and we changed to a new system for generating membership labels. We purchased a new computer in the last few months and then had to go buy Windows 7 to get it to work. This reminds me: years ago, my wife worked for a software vendor and would never do it again. “When you work for a vendor, the product does not have limitations, it has features,” she says.