Windows 2000 Passes the Million Unit Shipped Mark

On March 14, Microsoft announced that Windows 2000 (Win2K) sales surpassed the 1-million-unit sales mark less than 1 month after its official ship date of February 17. That figure doesn't include large corporation Win2K use via site licenses. On March 2, Microsoft announced that it had shipped 500,000 copies of Win2K, exceeding its internal projections.Microsoft's sales figures include sales to retail outlets, PC OEM vendors, and resellers. Most of these sales are undoubtedly for Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro); the announcement made no mention of the breakdown by version: Win2K Pro, Windows 2000 Server (Win2K Server), or Windows 2000 Advanced Server (Win2K AS). One month is still very early to predict Win2K sales results, but if initial results continue, Microsoft will ship about 14 million copies of the OS by next February. Remember, to these totals you must add Microsoft's volume sales to the enterprise, which Microsoft didn't disclose in this announcement. Site licenses often don't require an enterprise to disclose how many copies of Win2K it's using, and these licenses don't represent additional revenue to Microsoft.The announcement didn't mention the dollar volume that these sales represent. In addition, Microsoft announced that it had an extremely low volume of Win2K support calls compared to previous Windows OSs. The company touts reliability as an important reason to upgrade to Win2K.