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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."
Then let's settle into a nice discussion about how vista sucks because it's more of the same and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.
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 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!
That's one of the nice things about the free Open Source software in Open Office - you can open and save to all the formats.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Seriously..you assume that all non slashdotters are NASCAR fans?
;)
I would really rip into you if it were not so busy following the Anna Nichole Smith scandal
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.
Could it be that no one has the hardware to run Vista with all of its features turned on, and to make such an upgrade after purchasing Vista would invalidate the license, forcing another purchase of Vista?
People will wait until they need to purchase a new machine that it comes with Vista.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
A new OS is a much bigger commitment than a new Office suite. You generally are going to have zero compatibility problems with old documents and that's all you really need to worry about. If you end up not liking it, it's also not a big deal to replace it with your old version. A new OS is much more serious, and there are many more compatibility issues to worry about. It's not the kind of thing most want to rush in to.
I've been testing Vista at work and it's a good OS, but not ready for deployment yet. It's not Vista itself, it's apps and drivers. There's still plenty of hardware with drivers that aren't up to snuff, and a number of apps need to be updated to work on Vista. It's not the kind of thing I'd recommend most users walk in to yet. In another 3-6 months I'll probably look at deploying it to some of our labs.
Office, on the other hand, we are installing for anyone that orders a new copy. The volume keys are valid for either 2003 or 2007 so we are installing 2007 and will revert to 2003 if they don't like it. So far, nobody has asked to revert. There's just not really any technical issues. Yes there's a new interface and all, but all your documents open and that's the real concern.
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.
It's almost as if the crappy product with very little innovation is selling poorly, while the well thought out product that has some innovative features is doing nicely. Who woulda thought.
Ah, another person Experiences the Wow. Cherish this moment.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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
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.
*Open FireFox*
...
You are trying to open a web browser, do you want to open it?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
This web browser was not signed by Microsoft, operation aborted.
[ Okay ]
*click* *Open IE*
You are trying to open a program made by Microsoft. Good choice!
[ Okay ]
*click* *slashdot.org*
You are opening a port to connect to an external website. Are you sure? It might be dangerous.
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You are connecting to Slashdot.org. Are you sure you want to go there? How about MSN instead?
[ Continue ] [ Go to MSN ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You appear to be posting to Slashdot. Any comment you write might be read by third parties. Are you sure you want to continue?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You appear to be posting material that is disparaging to Microsoft. This is forbidden by section 66, paragraph 6 of your Windows Vista Super Mega Chair Monkey Team Hyper Force Go! ULTIMATE Edition EULA.
[ Report Yourself to Microsoft for Being Naughty ]
*BANG*
For sale: Like-new computer w/Vista. Slightly shotgunned.
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.
Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
First-week retail sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista were almost 60% below sales of boxed copies of Windows XP in the week after its 2001 release
Retail sales of PCs, virtually all of them sporting the new Vista OS, were up 67% over the same week in 2006. While that is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison -- many stores were clearing out their XP inventory in the weeks leading up to Vista's launch -- "it still reflects a fair bit of growth"
The good news for Microsoft: Consumers who are upgrading to Vista on their older machines are opting for pricier, higher-end versions of it. The average selling price of Vista was $207.13, up 66% from the average selling price of XP. That was due in part to the fact that more than 30% of the copies of Vista sold were the Ultimate version, which lists for $399. Early boxed retail sales of Vista down nearly 60% compared to XP
One might, of course, have expected boxed sales of Vista to be somewhat depressed by the distribution of free upgrade coupons distributed with PCs sold over the holidays.