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What else would you like them to say?

How many licenses are sitting with OEMs? If retails sales are below expectations the channel may have over purchased and items are sitting on the shelf.

How many sales are through enterprise agreements? These sales may be a bundle of licenses for different products. It is not unusual industry practice to throw in, for next to nothing, products that for strategic reasons, need to have sales numbers inflated. Or the enterprises may have purchased the license because they are contractually obligated to buy the latest desktop OS version.

It would seem odd to me if they created some new metric that we couldn't compare with Win7 and Vista sales.

Since what they mean has never been defined there is no metric. They could quite easily have changed what's being measured and no one would be the wiser.