4 million is nothing considering windows market share. They beat mountain lion by 1 million and mountain lion is a minor upgrade compared to windows 8. Compare it to windows 7 and windows 8 is a big loser.
"In July 2009, in only eight hours, pre-orders of Windows 7 at amazon.co.uk surpassed the demand which Windows Vista had had in its first 17 weeks.[72] It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.[73] After 36 hours, 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions sold out in Japan.[74] Two weeks after its release its market share had surpassed that of Snow Leopard, released two months previously as the most recent update to Apple's Mac OS X operating system.[75][76] "
Personally I tried Windows 8 when I was tasked to upgrade all the customer service machines at my company. So terrible we ended up switching over to Apple machines. Would have went Chromebooks but got vetoed since some employees need MS Office. Only our finance people are on PCs now because they don't want to relearn the Excel hotkeys.
"4 million is nothing considering windows market share."
This 4 million number is equal to the number of individual consumers who bought a shrink-wrapped Windows 8 UPGRADE box. It was announced 4 days after the launch of the platform on the 26th.
I think most consumers don't do much due diligence when upgrading/moving, they just go with what's new when they buy a PC. If where they're at is really bad, they might bother to upgrade.
Windows 7 had the advantage of coming after Vista. Vista sucked. People knew it sucked. Apple made funny commercials making fun of it (the MIB security dude). People wanted to leave it.
Windows 8 may or may not be good, but Windows 7 is good and a lot of people must be disinterested simply because they're fine at Windows 7.
"In July 2009, in only eight hours, pre-orders of Windows 7 at amazon.co.uk surpassed the demand which Windows Vista had had in its first 17 weeks.[72] It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.[73] After 36 hours, 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions sold out in Japan.[74] Two weeks after its release its market share had surpassed that of Snow Leopard, released two months previously as the most recent update to Apple's Mac OS X operating system.[75][76] "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mountain_Lion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
Personally I tried Windows 8 when I was tasked to upgrade all the customer service machines at my company. So terrible we ended up switching over to Apple machines. Would have went Chromebooks but got vetoed since some employees need MS Office. Only our finance people are on PCs now because they don't want to relearn the Excel hotkeys.