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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."
Vista received a huge marketing campaign, but most people who kept track of what Microsoft was doing for the past 5 years know that Vista could've been much better than what it turned out to be due to the development crash in August 2004.
Office, on the other hand, was praised as something which would make life much easier for people because of the new ribbon. There's even a home and student version for people who can't afford paying for standard edition.
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confirm response, accept or deny?
Vista bugs me too much. I killed it.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Having had access to the Vista RTM for several months through my MSDN subscription, Ive had a decent amount of friends and family asking me if they should upgrade. I always tell them thats its a fairly nice OS but its not worth the money. Take it if its free, but otherwise stick with what you have. There aren't enough feature updates to justify spending $100+.
People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. 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!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
And of those who did buy Vista, most didn't even want it!
I've helped four friends/family/FOAFs out so far who just bought a new PC and wanted to know how to get rid of Vista (the major OEMs no longer even give you a choice of XP).
They all, without exception, had the same set of complaints... They didn't know where to get at all the normal Windows tools, and despite having "upgraded" for a faster computer, their new machines, it felt significantly less responsive (I've translated a bit, and removed the streams of obscenities).
Short of piracy (or actually buying XP), I explained to them how to make Vista as XP-like as possible. Still not perfect, still a CPU and memory hog, still moved quite a bit around from the XP layout, but at least they could then use it.
Pathetic. If Microsoft wants to offer a new OS, fine. But they've gone out of their way to make it almost impossible to get a new, legal copy of XP, just so they can boost Vista's market penetration.
what OS they want?
People upgrade to keep current and compatible. I find little to no software that doesn't run on Windows 2000, forget about XP and Vista. They have XP because all the computers they bought came with it. Little incentive really came into play to upgrade to XP just as little incentive exists for upgrading to Vista.
People upgrade MS Office to ensure that when they are doing business with people, they will be able to open up the documents sent to them. MS Office is probably the ultimate achievement when it comes to viral marketing. (Or maybe I'm not using the term correctly?) But what I'm trying to say is that it has nothing to do with new features or new UIs and everything to do with supporting new file formats. And while end-users don't understand that it's a practice that is abusive to consumers and the marketplace in general, they understand that if they don't upgrade, they will run into problems such as not being able to open documents critical to their business activities.
Yesterday I sat in a coffee shop for 3 hours. I heard two groups of people discuss who they thought was the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.
Thing is, MS has the legs in terms of cash to wait for Vista to mature into a market force, even if all of us wait for Vista to mature into a better OS. People howled when XP came out, and now people don't want to give it up. When Win95 came out, it sold very well despite all the Win95 = Mac 88 jokes. Within three years expect Vista to the dominating operating system. Today's expensive hardware required to run the fancier parts of Vista will be next year's cheap hardware. The drivers to run everything will come and DX10 games will eventually show.
I will wait until I need to/want to upgrade, but I expect Vista will grow in usage even if I never adopt it. Whatever adoption rate regarding Vista is happening today, don't expect it to stay that way. Also don't expect MS to be crying that everyone isn't picking up a copy today.
The argument is that there *was* little incentive to go from 2000 to XP right away. Through time, it happened anyway but mostly because 2000 was less available or at least less visible. Now here we are with Vista and the same thing is happening.
In short, I'm arguing that history already shows us what to expect. There are no apps that induce upgrading to Vista and Vista itself is not motivation enough.
I'm guessing the high end would more for gaming, which apparently has issues under Vista at the moment. Also, could be that they sell more high end stuff to businesses, who usually aren't eager to adopt a "new" technology like Vista.
Microsoft would be nothing without the preloads. But they have the preloads. Anyone who thinks Vista sales won't take off, must have forgotten this.
Just be patient. As brand new machines are sold with Vista on them, the number of Vista users will grow. Then people can start running apps that only work with Vista. Then those people will want to exchange information with people who aren't running Vista yet. And then people will start to "upgrade," even if they're not buying a new machine.
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...and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.
It's also more of the same, but people haven't noticed yet because of the distraction of the Ribbon.
("Look over there - a shiny thing!" <runs away>)
you /. people really trip me out. All that software doesn't run correctly because it wasn't written correctly. How do you want it?
Do you want a pourus operating system that does everything as administrator by default, running apps that are designed to run as administrator by default.
OR
Do you want a secure operating system that does everything with a privledged account, running apps that are designed to run on a privledged account.
OR
Do you just want to bitch about Microsoft and pat each other with your whitty jokes and sarcastic responses with no consideration for reality.
Those bits have compatibility problems because they are designed to run as admin. Not because Microsoft broke Windows.
The problem is that Microsoft is trying to tighten security and programs which do not follow the Windows Logo requirements, specifications Microsoft has made available for 15 years, will break. Microsoft will never, ever be able to get away from Administrator-By-Default unless they carry this out and force ISVs to comply. The problems with deploying Vista are nearly identical to the problems with deploying Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP in a workplace using default Domain security settings.
QuickBooks is a perfectly example. It does not follow proper security and assumes that the user can write to any location of the file system or the registry on the workstation. Intuit's support even states that you must be at least a Power User to run this application. I am not at all surprised that this program does not work in Vista.
MS has usually bent themselves over backwards to attempt to ensure that all legacy applications work. There are actually shims built into the OS that permit stupid crap to happen without fail for specific applications. For example, there was a known bug in Sim City where it would attempt to reference a memory address shortly after the process released that block of memory. In Windows 9x, which did not enforce process memory spaces, this did not cause a problem. Under Windows NT/2000 it would cause a GPF (synonymous with a SEGFAULT), but the Windows team specifically built in a shim that if the binary is Sim City that it would permit the program to rereference a recently deallocated block of memory, just to keep the application working. There are thousands of such shims, and if they were willing to do this for a game imagine what they did for business applications.
Truth is that Microsoft cannot fix the OS without breaking applications. For a very long time they fought this but realized that they can't.
Yes it sucks, but if the eventual goal is a stable and secure system, I don't care how many crappy programs they break.
I personally think the reason sales are low is because not as many people are buying new computers, as they did during the 98-XP switch. The majority of Vista sales is going to be through new computer sales.
Since XP actually does a decent job of retaining speed (a reformat still does wonders), no one needs to buy a new computer. If all they use it for is web browsing and e-mail, why do they need a new computer/OS that does neither any better than XP (unless you count more flashy as better)?