One of the best examples of how the number can squish came last month, when Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that "more than 4 million upgrade copies" of Windows 8 had been sold in the first weekend of general availability, along with "tens of millions" of copies of Windows 8 going out to OEMs.
The first quote begs for definitions of the terms "sold" and "upgrade." I think it's fair to assume that 4 million people didn't pull out their credit cards and pay for a $40 online upgrade over the weekend, but I may be overly cynical. I will note in passing that anyone who bought a Windows 7 PC over the weekend, in some respects "paid" for an upgrade (see the "revenue deferral" argument), and companies that renewed their volume licenses over the weekend had Windows 8 slipped in for the ride.
As for shipping tens of millions of copies of anything to OEMs -- I can just see the truckloads of bits going to the loading docks at Lenovo, HP, and Dell -- we've seen those kinds of magic numbers before, when Ballmer was trying to convince the world that Microsoft had sold millions of copies of Windows Phone 7. In fact, Microsoft had "sold" the copies of Windows to manufacturers and phone companies, which, in turn, had a difficult time "selling" the products to breathing, paying customers.
This brings me to activation numbers. Microsoft knows darn well how many copies of Windows 8/Windows RT it's sold. Why won't the company tell us the number of copies that have been activated?
