Windows 8 appears to be a successful product for Microsoft, but it depends on how you look at it. Currently, Microsoft has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses. However, there are not that many people who are actually using a device running the new operating system.

Microsoft achieved the 100 million Windows 8 licenses sold in just a mere six months, according to ZDNet. This probably is due to OEMs being very excited to jump on the bandwagon of a new Windows platform; but if they had known that devices running Windows 8 would be a hard sell, the number might have been lower. You can see why PC makers like Samsung and Dell are complaining: so many licenses lying around and no one to sell them to.

"If there had been more touch devices in the market, it would have been even more," said Tami Reller, the chief financial officer of Microsoft's Windows client team. That said, "our sell-through has been consistently going up," Reller added.

That's all fine and dandy, but Microsoft needs to focus on getting Windows 7 and Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 8 before everything comes falling down. We see PC makers trying to get Windows 8 out there and into the hands of consumers with quality hybrid devices, but nothing appears to be working out properly. At the moment, the best-selling Windows 8 devices are the Microsoft Surface tablets; Microsoft managed to ship 900,000 of those in the first quarter of 2013, and no other OEM managed that much with a Windows 8- based device.

Many things could change for Microsoft in the long run, though, as the software giant is hard at work on Windows Blue, or Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 is said to bring some much-needed upgrading to Windows 8 to make it more user-friendly for touch, along with mouse and keyboard use for the advanced Windows user. There will also be a new version of Internet Explorer and smaller live tiles.