Jeffrey Snover from the Windows PowerShell Team blog: Having come up with the initial idea of Windows PowerShell and then worked on it for a (really) long time, I was very optimistic about how it would be received and widely it would be adopted. I have to admit that even I'm shocked at where we are just six months after our release mid Nov 2006 release.

Shortly before we released, Scott Ottaway (our marketing guy) expressed an opinion that we have a million downloads in our first year. I thought he was delusional or just plain ignorant about how long it takes for technologies like this to be adopted. Imagine how much crow I'm eating now that we are about to have our millionth download. That's right – PowerShell has had almost a MILLION DOWNLOADS IN ITS FIRST 6 MONTHS. People just can't get their heads around this – we keep double checking the numbers – but it's true. Note that this does NOT include the Windows Server 2008 (Server "Longhorn" Beta 3) usage.

Also, just six months ago we did not know if we would be in Windows Server 2008 ("Longhorn") but the team worked hard and got it in Beta 3. At MS, this is like moving a mountain because of our focus on testing and quality in late stages of product development but we were able to get it in WS08 within 3 months of given the go ahead.