Sales were projected as high as $720 million on release day. The marketing campaign for Windows 95 was estimated at $1 billion and spanned the entire industry. The Windows 95 release included a commercial featuring
The Rolling Stones' 1981 single "
Start Me Up" (a reference to the Start button). It was widely reported that
Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones between US$8 and US$14 million for the use of the song in the Windows 95 advertising campaign. However, Microsoft said that this was just a rumour spread by the band to increase their market value, and the company paid US$3 million. A 30-minute promotional video, labeled a "cyber sitcom," featuring
Jennifer Aniston and
Matthew Perry, was also released to showcase the features of Windows 95. Microsoft's US$200 million advertising campaign featured stories of people waiting in line outside stores to get a copy. In the UK, the largest computer chain,
PC World, received a large quantity of point-of-sale material; many branches opened at midnight to sell the first copies of the product. Copies of
The Times were available for free, and Microsoft paid for 1.5 million issues (twice the daily circulation at the time). In the United States, the
Empire State Building in
New York City was lit to match the colors of the Windows logo. The release included a number of "Fun Stuff" items on the CD, including music videos of
Edie Brickell's "Good Times" and
Weezer's "
Buddy Holly," a trailer for the 1995 film
Rob Roy and the computer game
Hover! Sales were strong, with one million copies shipped worldwide in just four days. According to
International Data Corporation, by the end of 1998, Windows 95 was the most used desktop OS with 57.4% of the marketshare, with its successor
Windows 98 coming in second at 17.2%. Windows 95 also still sold more non-
OEM copies to large customers in the month of May 1999, which analysts attributed to large companies opting to wait for the release of
Windows 2000.
Editions Several Windows 95 editions have been released. Only the original release and the Service Pack 1 reissue were sold as a shrink-wrapped products; later editions were provided only to computer
OEMs for installation on new PCs. For this reason, these editions are known as
OEM Service Releases (
OSR). Together with the introduction of Windows 95, Microsoft released the
Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 pack, which contained several optional components for high-end multimedia PCs, including Internet Explorer, DriveSpace and additional themes. Service Pack 1 was made available half a year after the original release and fixed several small bugs. Service Pack 2 mainly introduced support for new hardware, most notably support for hard drives larger than 2 GB in the form of the
FAT32 file system. This release was never made available to end-users directly and was only sold through OEMs (OSR2) with the purchase of a new PC. A full third service pack was never released, but two smaller revisions to the second were released in the form of a USB Supplement (OSR2.1) and the
Windows Desktop Update (OSR2.5). Both were made available as updated disc images shipped by OEMs, and the Windows Desktop Update was also released with the standalone Internet Explorer 4.0 release. OSR2.5 was notable for featuring several changes to the Windows Explorer, integrating it with Internet Explorer 4.0—this version of Internet Explorer looks very similar to the one featured in Windows 98. To celebrate the launch of Windows 95, Microsoft released a special edition of Windows 95 in a possibly limited production of 3,000 units. ==Reception==