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Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well
PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."
Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?
Also, folks using Word 2000 and later can use the new formats with a compatibilty pack
You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!
You're misinformed. All versions of office from 97-2k3 can open each others files with no need to do anything special when saving or loading.
Ballmer didn't "admit that previous sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive'".
The implication of that statement is:
- Ballmer/Microsoft issued a sales forecast in the past
- They were pressured on the accuracy of said forecast
- They admitted that their forecasts were overly aggressive.
However, that's not what happened here. The sales forecasts in question were made by external analysts. In this case, it's Ballmer and Microsoft disagreeing with the forecasts. The word "admit" implies that you are conceding something that you tried to conceal before.
Why does Slashdot need to spin every story to try and make it sound even more negative than it is?
Mmmm.. Donuts
It's interesting that Dell doesn't sell XP on the low end machines but it's still available on the mid and high end. Their consumer calls go to India and business calls don't. Are they turning the home users into a large beta test group using the cheaper support resources?
They also have a laptop for $499 which they haven't had in quite a while. It's only available with Vista. Maybe M$ is giving it away (or almost giving it away) to Dell to infect the market?
A quick check of the HP site doesn't seem to have any XP options even on the high end.
Seems like there was a good reason to remove the control from Vista. Also, it appears there are solutions for desktop apps that use the control.