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Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well

Posted by Zonk on from the business-of-windowing dept.

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."

17 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Thing is... by gcnaddict · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:Thing is... by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Replace "most people" with "most people on Slashdot"... Most people have no idea what MS has done in the past 5 years, nor do they care. The NASCAR scandal is all they can handle right now.

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    2. Re:Thing is... by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Vista had a lot of marketing among the technology industry, but it also had a ton of bad press from beta testers reviewing it (You are posting a comment critical to Windows Vista, confirm or deny?). The mass media marketing did not really get into gear until fairly recently, and by that time anyone who was familiar with technology was already spreading the news that Vista was not very much different than XP except that it broke a lot of things that work under XP without providing a well-known mechanism for backward compatibility (even XP's broken Win95 emulation mode was better than nothing).

      When faced with a new product that works almost the same as the old product except that existing software doesn't work very well on it, I don't see why it's such a shock that uptake has been so slow.

    3. Re:Thing is... by spellraiser · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not surprised at all either. Vista offers nothing substantially new that justifies the price of an upgrade. Sure, it has a fancy new interface and supposedly better security, but at the end of the day it's just a little bit of more of the same. There's only so much you can squeeze out of a desktop system - after all, it's only the bones of the system. The meat is in the applications. If your OS is already quite good enough and does everything you need it to do, why shell out for an upgrade?

      However, Office 2007 at least supposedly offers a revolutionary new way to use the application. It seems that this promise has enormous appeal for people. For instance, I'm having a harder time than ever debating the merits of OpenOffice. It seems Microsoft could have a winner there, loath as I am to admit it. Doesn't change the fact that I'm sticking with OO and Linux, but still ...

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    4. Re:Thing is... by Clazzy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But the people on Slashdot are the people who buy the operating systems. The average person would never go out to the shops and buy Vista, they'd buy a computer with it preinstalled.

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    5. Re:Thing is... by the_macman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Replace "most people" with "most people on Slashdot"... Most people have no idea what MS has done in the past 5 years, nor do they care. The NASCAR scandal is all they can handle right now.
      Actually...you're dead wrong. You are correct most people don't pay attention to MS, but people aren't gonna go out and pay $250 (or however much it costs) for something they don't know about.

      I know for a FACT that people who are clueless about computers already have the idea Vista sucks and do not want to buy it.

      You know why? They ask US for advice and we tell them it sucks. I can personally think of 5+ accounts of average users asking about upgrading to Vista and a horde of geeks respond with a resounding NO! These are some of the things I've heard average users say about Vista...

      1. "It's riddled with anti-piracy locks, why get Vista when my pirated copy of XP works fine"
      2. "XP works great, why should I get Vista?"
      3. "I heard it won't run on my computer"
      4. "Unless your computer is brand new it will run like crap"
      5. "It sucks for games. If you want to game man, stick with XP"

      So don't say people have no idea about Vista, that is simply untrue.
  2. Re:Is anyone surprised? by SirMeliot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not remotely surprised. XP was a huge upgrade from Win 98. In comparison Vista's more like Win Me

  3. Not Surprising by Rycross · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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+.

    1. Re:Not Surprising by fermion · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The price is the key issue. The cheap versions are of confusing fuctionality, and the cost of the full version, often bought by people who don't need it, but hate to buy limited versions, are astronomical. The cost of the OS is now more than the computer it runs on(And don't say that good PCs are $1000, because that is the cost of Apple, and we all know that Apples are at least twice the price of the PC).

      OTOH, cost may only be half the issue. When XP came out, MS did not have a mature mainstream OS. Many were able to NT, but many other were still on 98, or, even worse, ME. Only a limited number of people were on 2000. When XP was released, the market was desperate for an OS that just worked, and, after a couple years, XP did mostly just work. Only the die hards stay with 2000.

      If we go even deeper, we know that Vista should be an inferior product, if not a total failure. MS does come out with consecutive reliable OS. Perhaps Vista 3.11 will meet expectations, but not Vista 1.00.

      --
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    2. Re:Not surprising by mingot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents.

      The poster I replied to mentioned he had to install office to "send some documents". I'm pretty sure that "send some documents" does not mean that he wants to convert and send "hundreds of thousands" of documents. For this user I am quite sure that the "save as" function would have worked quite well, and he admits as much in a followup message.

      Compatibility pack?! You're killing me. You have to install an extra in order to make MS Office compatible with MS Office?

      Is it that unreasonable to have to update older versions of a product to consume newer versions of file formats? I mean if I grabbed a copy of mosaic from 1990 I don't think it would do a very good job of displaying PNG files, would it? Or CSS. Or modern HTML. (much like the IE of today, HAHA). It would require a *gasp* update.

  4. Not surprising by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

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  5. Imagine if people actually had a choice! by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  6. Re:I think you're being a bit unfair..... by DrDitto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. This is not a foot race by Bullfish · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Queue up the chair jokes! by ozbird · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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>)

  9. Re:Queue up the chair jokes! by smaddox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)?

  10. Re:Is anyone surprised? by SEMW · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Vista, however, is so rushed and incomplete that SP1 is actually coming later this year. 5 years in development, and over one and a half years in Beta (that's three seperate complete releases of Ubuntu in the time Vista's been in beta), and you're calling it rushed? You can accuse Vista of being many things, not all particularly complimentary, but I don't think rushed is one of them.

    Re the SP1 thing, IIRC from what I've read that's a combination of bringing Vista up to date with the by-then-released Longhorn Server and pacifying the "Don't upgrade till SP1!" crowd; but I could be wrong.
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