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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."

2 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Things have to *work* first.... by chaboud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.

    I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.

    Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.

    This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.

    They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.

  2. Re:Not surprising by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone I Know bought a laptop with Vista on it. She then installed Office 2003 on it, since she already owned that (and the Office EULA specifically allows you to install it on a second portable machine). What happened was that although it runs just fine, Vista throws up requesters every time she starts an office app telling her that she's not using the correct version of Office for running under Vista.

    My guess is that a lot of the Office 2007 sales are due to this -- Microsoft makes it hard for people to continue to use old versions, even though they work. So they give up and buy Office 2007 whether they need it or not.

    Regards,
    --
    *Art