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.
There’s nobody better at spinning the news to its favour than Microsoft. They could very well have shipped out 20 million licenses to OEMs and warehouses but sold less than one million.
It’s not the first time I’ve been this skeptical about Microsoft, obviously.
There’s nobody better at spinning the news to its favour than Microsoft.
Twenty million is already have more installs than all Linux distros combined, with plenty of room left over for every BSD variant. And that’s just in one month of sales. How does that possibly need to be “spun” to be good news for Microsoft?
Edited 2007-03-27 01:07
“Twenty Million”
Novell quoted in there last as 80 Million, although at the current rate of installs that is still only 3 months away from passing Linux. Although I don’t think its relevant.
It is spun to be good news, simply becuase people not *choosing* Vista. People are getting Vista by default. Thats the real news. Ballmer is blaming *piracy* for the slow uptake.
The question is how many of the installs are not kept track of, for example, I downloaded SLED and installed it onto 3 machines; I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 6 onto 15 desktop machines – all of these aren’t kept track of by statistics.
Ultimately, dollar value and numbers are meaningless; there is no way to accurately measure, especially if one can’t easily purchase a non-Windows machine from Dell (you can purchase them in NZ) or one of the big names, and given that there are a large number like me who just can’t be bothered going through the stress of trying to get blood out of a stone.
Lots of noise, but no actual numbers except for the 20 million and no mention where they got that number from. Here’s the red flag in the article :
So basically you just have the word of of a guy who will get fired if he says anything to undermine MS stock price backed up with no verifiable numbers or a plausible breakdown of sales. It might even be true but I couldn’t tell from this article – put me squarely in the sceptic camp.
Apart from myself, who has been beta-testing for years. I do not know anyone who uses Vista. Even people who have bought new PCs since launch and are now using XP.
To me, Vista appears to be the biggest flop in computing history.
Lots of noise, but no actual numbers except for the 20 million and no mention where they got that number from.
Well, since they stated that 20 million copies of Vista had sold, I’d have to say they got that number from the number of copies that they had sold.
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
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.
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
Windows is the only brand of OS you can get preloaded on a PC without explicitly searching for niche vendors that offer something different. At the risk of violating rule #1 of web forums, let’s try an analogy: Imagine if every car dealership in America sold only Ford cars, but you could order a Toyota and have it freighted over from Japan if you really wanted, or you could custom-order a BMW from Germany for more money. The vast majority of Americans would end up driving Fords, a certain socioeconomic group would appreciate the BMW, and a small niche would endure the minor hassles to get the Toyota because it’s more efficient and reliable (but not any cheaper because of the import tariffs). That’s pretty much the OS situation for consumers.
Vista might not be forced (instead of XP) at all OEMs, but it is at some of them. But nobody in the unwashed masses will choose XP when Vista is available. Why would they choose an out-dated “computer” over a newer, cooler one? These people don’t know DRM from ATM.
OSX is no option at all, as long as one has to buy Apple’s computers to run it.
Why not, they are better made than PC’s for their price and you can run Windows on them.
See the problem is there are better OS’s out there put people just dont want them even if they are 1p more. In the end it’s a mind set and the mind set is still Windows even on a cheap crappy PC with crappy hardware.
Haha. They included all the upgrade coupons distributed last year that were never used, or if they were used, never installed. Gotta love marketing spin :p
Edited 2007-03-26 23:04
I was quite surprised at the amount of upgrade interest in my university. It was strongly recommended by IT to NOT upgrade, but a number of people went ahead and did it. The MSDN-AA licenses have been constantly used up.
But most of you are right… Vista will come primarily with a new computer. What people forget is that Microsoft sells its OS to people with a few pieces of candy to get them to buy it. Their real customers, though, are developers. Developers make Windows something other than a nice thing to have for which there are many alternatives. Windows exclusive applications make it into an absolute requirement in order to get work done.
The steps are:
1. Build developer tools and new APIs for Windows.
2. Build some UI candy and “wow” features (people are easily impressed) to convince people that it’s worth upgrading.
3. Create a large enough market to make Vista-only titles worthwhile and sell it to developers.
4. Profit from everyone upgrading to use the latest apps.
I personally don’t find this to be too evil.
“3. Create a large enough market to make Vista-only titles worthwhile and sell it to developers.
4. Profit from everyone upgrading to use the latest apps. ”
That’s pure bull. There are no Vista-only apps, and most of the big players haven’t updated their apps at all, hell there isn’t even drivers for everything yet.
Not yet… they’ll come in the future. We’re still at the ‘candy’ stage.
Microsoft already announced their first game to be shipped only for Windows Vista.
You didn’t really think he ment all these 4 steps to be done in some months, did you?
It doesn’t surprise me one iota. Microsoft has been shipping shitty Windows code for a long time, and now it expects software developers etc to suddenly completely re-write their software/drivers to keep up with the Vista model? Why bother? I say just boycott Microsoft Vista. If Software vendors had balls, and OEMs had balls as well, Microsoft wouldn’t be the monopoly that it is today.
As to the article, I bet certain parts of my bodies that 95% if not more, of this ‘value’ is derived from OEM sales. Look at it this way, Microsoft knows that its development model is suspect (5 years plus to get Vista out of the door, with a reduction in at least 50% of the inital development features shipping in the RTM version). It needs to keep sales positive, because otherwise it’ll lose face in the stock market, and also with shareholders. So – *force* OEMs to ONLY sell Vista. No option for the customer to buy XP pre loaded. That way, you *force* the sales of Vista, and make it look good, and can go to your shareholders etc “hey, it’s selling!!!”.
Deception, deception, and thrice deception, but nothing unusual for Microsoft.
Dave
What you refer to as software makers having balls, I call sacrificing certain profits now to uncertain profits in the future. If I’m setting out to write some software to make money, I want to write for what people are using now, so I can sell now and have money for more development in the future. I don’t care about changing the world or breaking the MS monopoly. I just want to make my buck.
Vista doesn’t break as much as is claimed. Yes, some drivers and many system-level utilities are broken. Most software that people use to get work done still runs just fine… this is the kind of software that the Intuits, Adobes, and Skypes of the world make money writing. On the other hand, Vista gives them guaranteed deployment of a bunch of runtime frameworks (.NET 3.0) and a bunch of new features in the Core OS like better networking management (e.g. it’s easier to determine if you’re connected to the internet in the first place) and ACID operations on files and the registry. When Vista becomes deployed enough, we’ll see Vista-only apps becoming mainstream, just like so much software is now incompatible with Win9x.
Vista’s a pretty big change. Enough that things won’t be forward compatible like they were between XP and 2000 (where nearly everything in XP would run in the 2000 environment).
That might be the case – but – I’m in the support industry and *every* single person that I’ve spoken to has cursed Vista. EVERY single one. I’ve only had about 20 customers. Make of it what you think…
Dave
I think that it only normal, as you work in support industry. I suspect it is very rare case people calling for support just to hail their OS. Why should they call if it were allright?
“That’s pure bull. There are no Vista-only apps, and most of the big players haven’t updated their apps at all, hell there isn’t even drivers for everything yet.”
I don’t expect there to be that many Vista-only apps. WPF-only apps is another story. There are already a number of those, as listed here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/WPF.ApplicationPortfolio
One can install WPF on XP (as part of .NET 3.0), but most won’t. WPF apps will mostly be run on Vista computers.
Thats what I always keep saying; if the applications were not part of the equation – lets say they were all written in Java and could run on any platform, I’d find it highly unlikely that anyone would be running Windows.
That is why I keep bashing Adobe and the likes – it is the developers who maintain Microsofts monopoly by not making their applications available on other platforms – and ultimately when bad things happen, and Microsoft abuses its monopoly, the third parties quite frankly should share the blame; customers only buy what they can use; its the developers themselves which make or break the platform as to whether it is adopted on mass.
have switched to Vista. All upgrades went smooth. Only a few drivers are missing.
Microsoft did good work.
Yeah, but Ronald, we all know you are a fscking shill
There are things I like about vista (better default security, better layout), and things I don’t like (dropping of direct sound, changing things that dint needed to be changed for the sake of changing them).
After using it for a bit I do think its better over all then XP. I think in about 6 months when more drivers come out and we start seeing apps actually made for vista instead of just vista compatible it will be a lot better.
My local bestbuy has trouble keeping it on the shelves, so it actually does sell well, but then again bestbuy is the only computer store around ware I live
. I ended up getting the OEM version of home prem for 130$ instead of shelling out for the full or the upgrade version.
I do think that most versions of vista will be sold as part of a new computer. However many people are buying a new computer just to get vista, there is a reason why almost all adds for PC now talk about vista
…changing things that dint needed to be changed for the sake of changing them…
You can’t dislike that. Putting menu items through the “MS Menu Randomizer” is one of the key features of any and all Microsoft upgrades. The practice almost defines the upgrade process for them.
This post refers to a specific aspect. There have been thousands of threads discussing the various merits/drawbacks of vista. This topic has nothing to do with drivers the Aero *except* when it is *directly related to the Topic.
Its an interesting topic. The article itself is pretty sparse on real data. Microsoft say they are successful in selling Vista.
I’m pretty certain after 5 years of waiting and a half a billion dollar launch nobody is saying WOW, and Vista has been out since November.
Is 20Million is nothing compared to the 1Billion in circulation.
…but I know like everyone here I *will* be using Vista sometime becuase its a monopoly.
Lets keep on topic
My guess is people were holding off buying new PCs until Vista’s general avaliability.
Vista will eventually have the 80%+ client marketshare Windows XP has today. Might as well suck it up and move along.
Very few people know about Linux and even fewer care unfortuantly.
Up until 2003, I didn’t think of Unix as anything but that thing my father used at work to look up vehicle part numbers.
Awareness can only be established with lots of money and OEM support, which also corrisponds with lots of money.
I like these “microsoft says…” jokes.
I rember one sentence Steve Ballmer said: “when you want a secure computer, you have to put it in a safe”.
and I thought: no thanks.
Vista is so far a PITA for a certain demographic into which I partly fall: gamers.
The forums for Armed Assault and Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl are full of people moaning about problems with Vista*. I expect they’ll be sorted, but I just can’t imagine springing for Vista now, before things settle down. It’s asking for trouble.
* not placing blame: not differentiating between app, OS and driver problems. They are simply problems that don’t exist with XP.
You have to know that if the numbers really were that rosy for Vista they would be giving you all kinds of stats. Because they are using the tactic of “trust us, they are great” you know they are not. Besides, with WGA every time Vista phones home they should get an update of who is using what. A breakdown of what is actually being used should be as easy as pulling a report from their WGA server.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-vistas-twofold-sales-…
It means I might soon received my “free” upgrade to Vista from a computer purchased last November !!!!! </sarcasm>
here in India at least, one cant buy a retail PC or laptop from a major supplier like dell or hp without Windows Vista,
yup, u don’t even get to choose, Windows XP…. given a choice at least 70% of the unfortunate users would trade it for XP
with strong arm tactics like that, its no surprise they can come up with such numbers
I’ve not had any inclination to downgrade from pclos to vista. Although I still keep my 5 gig XP partition around for the odd game that cegega / crossover office won’t run. Anyway I have yet to meet anyone using vista (i tried it over a 2 week period and slapped XP back on quicktime (no not apple
)
All the Best
Alie
This is how it works in my “neighborhood”:
two of my friends followed my advice and one purchased a HP AMD Turion based laptop with XP Media Center for their daughter and other one bought a dual Pentium III system I’ve build two years ago with Windows 2000 on it. My third friends wife decided to buy Apple Macintosh to their teenage grandson and now their son z(a jet-airplane pilot) is asking me to load SuSE 10.2 on his refurbished Thinkpad.
My daughter who’s going to start her postgraduate studies in civil engineering at UC Berkley this is autumn is already making her first steps with FreeBSD 6.2 on an old Compaq Presario laptop.
And I have four more Linux computers waiting to be given away to people unwilling to buy expensive room heaters running Vista.
One oldie Celeron PC is playing mp3 27/7 in my shop at job and my two coworkers cannot hide their excitement with simple and rock-stable Vector Linux 5.8 ( more than 30 days uptime).
And, BTW, all above mentioned persons have enough money to buy new systems with Vista but they -didn’t.
So there’s no Vista in my eyesight. Only Windows defectors.
I have no doubt Vista sales are counte in millions of copies but there’s no hype and hi-ho around it as it was back in days Windows 95, Windows ME and windows 2000 were introduced.
If 20 million copies were sold, how many of those were activated/registered?
Who goes and pays hard earned cash for the product, and then not uses the software…