Tami Reller, Windows chief marketing officer and chief financial officer at Microsoft, announced at the J.P. Morgan tech forum at CES 2013 that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date. As it appears, after Microsoft sold 40 million licenses in the first month of general availability, it took the software giant over 1.5 months to sell another 20 million licenses.

The cumulative sales of Windows 8 including both upgrades and sales to OEMs for new devices are now at 60 million units, which does not necessarily mean that 60 million PCs actually utilize the new operating system, considering the fact that enterprise and business customers have hardly installed the OS, even though they own appropriate licenses.

According to Microsoft this is a similar sales trajectory that it saw with Windows 7, which is hardly good, considering that the PC market has grew pretty significantly from 2009 levels when the world was in the midst of the worst economic downturn in decades.

“We have seen a significant increase in the number of Windows 8 certified systems since general availability at the end of October. There are now more than 1700 certified systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT,” said Brandon LeBlanc, a spokesman for Microsoft.

This week Microsoft also highlighted strong growth in developers building for Windows 8. Since the opening of the Windows Store the number of apps has quadrupled and passed the 100 million app download mark, which is not surprise, considering the fact that at least 30 million Windows 8-based PCs are online now.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Business, Windows 8, Windows RT