More than 20 million copies of Windows Vista were sold globally in February 2007, the first month of sales since its widespread consumer release. That is significantly more than the 17 million copies of Windows XP that were sold in the first two months following its release in October 2001, Kevin Kutz, a director in Microsoft's Windows client group, told eWeek in an interview on March 26.
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Member since:2006-03-12
Shows total PC's worldwide its about twice the number.
http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0203.htm
Also XP was launched in October so this is not really comparing like with like.
People actually bought boxed copies of Vista then.
I don't think you can actually measure the success of a Monopolistic product.
Member since:2005-11-11
Nice link to the Computer Industry Almanac. I modded you up for that however when you imply that Vista is a monopolistic product, I don't agree. XP might have something of a monopoly, or rather, broad market acceptance, true. Vista is a decent OS but it's not required or forced at this point. If you want to buy a new PC with WinXP and not Vista, you can.
If that changes in the next 12 months to where XP is no longer widely available, I'd say Vista's main competition, WinXP, the current 'monopolistic' OS, has been unmonopolized by a better product for which hardware vendors are actually interested to write drivers. 
There IS choice out there, but it's not too widely known. Ubuntu, PC-BSD, OSX, etc etc etc
Edited 2007-03-27 04:11
Member since:
2005-07-06
I sort of suspect that there are more PC:s around now, than there were in 2001. The sales from this time last year would have been much more telling.
My guess is that the major part of the Vista sales comes from Vista bundled with new computers and very few people actually buy an upgrade. If you consider that, if there had been no Vista, these computers would have bundled with XP instead. So basically Microsoft wasted their money developing Vista.
Edited 2007-03-26 22:57