By the Numbers is Microsoft's already-out-of-date new infographic website

Do you wonder how many Windows 8 licenses Microsoft has sold? Are you kept awake at night trying to calculate how many minutes are spent speaking on Skype globally each day? Intrigued to learn how many pageviews MSN gets each month? Well fret no more! The answers to all of these ponderings and plenty more besides can be found on Microsoft's new By the Numbers website.

In a break from the usual look of Microsoft sites, the modern styling of Windows 8 is used here to produce an interactive infographic that does an excellent job of blowing Microsoft's trumpet. The tiled interface mimics that found on Windows 8's Start screen, but the difference here is that live tiles are used to display key statistics about various areas of Microsoft's business.

For what is essentially an exercise in lauding itself, Microsoft by the Numbers is a good-looking site. It's a great bit of branding, but whether it will do much to convert skeptics to the Start screen remains to be seen.

There are some interesting figures highlighted. Apparently SkyDrive is home to 11 billion photos, and one in seven people use Office. There are also a number of rather sillier figures to lighten the mood -- if you care how much pizza and cola are consumed on the Microsoft campus each year, prepare to put your mind at ease as this valuable data is revealed.

Despite the declaration that the data "is current as of August 11, 2013" a lot of the figures quoted are already a few months old. The usage number for Bing, for instance, is based on comScore research in June. The sales figures for Windows 8 are also a little dated. Unless sales have seriously plateaued, the 100 million licenses proclaimed to have been shifted is likely to be rather higher -- this landmark was actually reached some three months ago. It would be great if the site could get updated on a regular basis.

There are no useful statistics available for Windows Phone -- the number of apps available in the App Store is pointed out, but what we're interested in is how many are downloaded, and how much money is being made. The lack of any sort of reference to Surface is also worth noting; this may change, but from the infographic, it's as though the platform just doesn't exist!

For anyone who prefers their stats in a more traditional form, the data is also available as a rather less exciting, and decidedly less interactive, PDF file.