Gates: 40 Million Copies of Vista Sold

During his keynote at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Tuesday, Bill Gates told an audience of developers that 40 million copies of Windows Vista have sold in the first 100 days of the operating system's release - a figure more than the install base of Windows' competitors combined.

The 40 million sales figure does, however, includes copies of Vista that were sold before the OS launched at the end of January through upgrade options on new PCs. Still, Gates said the rate of adoption of Vista is twice that seen for Windows XP in 2001. Premium editions of Vista account for 78 percent of sales, he added.