Re: "Sold"? Not quite
I bought an upgrade for my machine, which came with Windows 7 Home Premium, and since then the only place that the version of Windows 8 Pro with Media Center that I got from the cheap upgrade has been installed is a virtual machine that I haven't turned on and still has one, maybe two icons on the desktop for it.
I got it (because it was so cheap and that's X amount of years of extra updates MS will have to give me if the time comes that Windows 7 gets phased out) and got upgraded with it, and got free keys for Windows Media Center from MS for it, and still can't be bothered to actually USE it. It's just too much a drop in productivity for me and does NOTHING that 7 couldn't do on the same hardware.
I'll keep it in the VM, on the basis that disk space is pretty cheap nowadays and VT instructions in processors make it "free" to run, but only really for the Pro features that let me manage a network I might stumble into without having to fight for licences or use another machine. ANd if there's anything I really *need* from Windows 8 (unlikely at this stage), I can run it in VMWare's Unity mode and get the Windows 8 windows showing on my Windows 7 desktop.
I have no doubt they sold a BUCKET of upgrades at one-tenth the cost of a newer, more featureful copy of Windows (the MS store keeps giving me some ridiculous prices to upgrade this Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Pro, for example). Of course. But that doesn't mean it's a success.
I'd probably lay money that in the YEARS it will take to kill off Windows 7 (hell, we've only just barely managed it with XP, haven't we?), that Windows 8 VM of mine will become increasingly irrelevant and never make it onto bare hardware.
It's easy to get huge sales figures for a turkey of a product, by just lowering the price to some ridiculous value that most people will fling on just for the hell of it. What would be more interesting is development and distribution costs vs that income, which of course MS are unlikely to publish until they have a Windows 9 that they really want to push by "recognising" that nobody was using 8.