Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.’s sales of its Windows 7 operating system were “fantastic,” exceeding revenue from any of its previous operating software releases in the first 10 days, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said.

“Windows 7 is an example of the kind of innovations that I think are important in the technology marketplace,” Ballmer said at a news briefing in Tokyo today.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, began selling Windows 7 on Oct. 22 and said the next day it sold more copies of Windows last quarter than in any previous period. Orders for the new operating system and high demand for the Windows XP used on cheap laptops called netbooks boosted total Windows sales in the three months.

At retail, Microsoft sold more than triple the number of units of Windows 7 in the first few days on the market than the previous Vista version, according to data from research firm NPD Group Inc. released today. Revenue was 82 percent higher, Port Washington, New York-based NPD said.

Microsoft is “more bullish” on the personal-computer market than three months ago and expects the recovery in consumer sales to continue, Bill Koefoed, a general manager at the company, said last month. Corporate demand is sluggish and won’t rebound this quarter as some analysts expect, he said.

PC sales rose 2.3 percent in the third quarter, according to IDC, resuming growth a quarter earlier than the Framingham, Massachusetts-based research firm had projected.

Most people who buy new PCs will get Windows 7, Ballmer said yesterday in Taipei.

Search Agreement

The software maker, which announced a search-engine partnership with Yahoo! Inc. in the U.S. in July, may expand the agreement to overseas markets, Ballmer said, without giving further details. The expansion will depend on Microsoft’s experience in the U.S. and regulatory approval, he said.

The accord, originally slated to be completed by Oct. 27, will take longer than expected to negotiate, Yahoo said last month.

The deal is meant to provide a bigger competitor to Google Inc. by having Yahoo and Microsoft join forces in the search market. Under the partnership, Yahoo would put Microsoft’s Bing search engine on its Web sites and split the related advertising revenue.

“Google is king of search and we are going to work hard,” Ballmer said. “When you are a small volume player, and there is a lot of local content in building a service in search, you really do have to do much more work to convert to different localities, countries, languages.”

Microsoft rose 41 cents to $28.47 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 4 p.m. New York time. The stock has gained 46 percent this year, compared with an 18 percent advance by the S&P 500 Index.

To contact the reporter on this story: Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 5, 2009 16:03 EST