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MS Says Vista Selling At Twice XP's Pace
Several readers made us aware that Microsoft said today that it sold more than 20 million Windows Vista licenses in the first month after the OS's general debut on January 30. This compares to 17 million licenses of XP sold in the first two months after its release. (Just a coincidence the announcement came out a day after this community's speculation, surely.) Most of the coverage of this story, picked up from Reuters, looks like it follows an MS press release. The Associated Press dug deeper, noting that since XP's release the overall PC market has grown by almost a factor of 2, so it would be a surprise if Vista didn't do twice as well: "...51 million PCs were sold to consumers worldwide in 2002; this year... 96 million consumers will buy a computer." Also, Microsoft's 20 million figure includes the backlog of upgrade coupons bundled with XP computers sold since last October.
Two brand new Dell Dimension Workstations ($1200 each) came into our office last week. One remimaged to XP (SP2) because office user said Vista (Pro) was slower than crap. The other was regulated to the lab for dual-boot Redhat/SuSE client testing. Vista wiped clean off it.
What Microsofts Marketing Machine states and what users do are two different things.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
> In summary: computer sales up; consumers forced to adopt Vista. Microsoft chuckles gleefully.
[RANT SIZE="VERY LONG"]
Well, at least one of the people I know was actually waiting for Vista to come out (against my advice... but his old computer was Windows ME, so he may be a Microsoft masochist). Of course, he promptly had me out there attempting to fix it because, although it was brand new, it didn't work very well. A few things were just a matter of moving things around: the start menu search is nice, mostly because everything in it was shuffled around for the sake of change--MS Word's "that logo in the upper left is your new File menu" was the stupidest and most confusing change, though. Given that the logo used to be a menu with options like restore, minimize, and close it's not the first place you'd expect to find things like save or open; I finally found it only by process of elimination after looking through most of the other tabs.
And a helpful bit of advice: do NOT use Vista if you want to use a TV tuner. They don't seem to work. DRM? Drivers? I'm not totally sure, but I am convinced that it's an utter waste of time to talk with Bangalore about it (all of Dell's Vista support seems to be in India, the reps transfer you to India immediately, we were unable to get a rep who could speak intelligible English, but worked with them reinstalling useless drivers for a couple of hours, anyhow).
Thus far, I know of no one who has gotten a TV tuner working properly under Vista, so I'm inclined to blame the DRM given that these are brand new Dells and the recordings seem to have the audio downsampled to painful-to-listen-to bitrates (it sounded like they were talking over SSB radio, if that helps any, maybe it just puts the audio through a tight bandpass filter?). Whatever it was doing, we were told a few weeks ago that they'd "contact us if they found a solution." I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and if you're wondering where the obligatory UAC Allow/Cancel joke is, they're not funny after you've used the stupid thing for 10 minutes. They really, really piss you off in no time flat.
Free bit of advice, if anyone asks you to fix their Vista system: echo y | format c:
Trust me, you're doing them a favor. It's that painful to use.
[/RANT]
- A Very, Very Bitter Techie
Can it open ODF, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc. formats natively within its own OS or office applications?
Does it support writing to PDF natively?
Can it natively play all of my media audio and video formats, including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Theora and others?
Does it support onboard IM clients using standards-compliant protocols (Jabber? irc? Others?)
Can I use freely available tools to build software on it, and do those tools come with the OS itself?
Can I read multiple filesystems at the same time on multiple different external and internal media? Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and other filesystems?
Can I mount NFS shares to other non-Vista resources with existing, included applications/tools?
Remind me again what Vista does that my Linux box can't? Oh wait... purty jellybean graphics and melted-crayon menus and icons. Right.
No thanks, Linux does more, on less resources, at less cost, and is more extensible, secure and updates are MUCH easier to manage.. oh, and I KNOW what's running under the covers, and if I don't, I can go look and see for myself.
If you buy Vista Business, or Ultimate - you have downgrade rights to install XP Pro... This is what I am doing at my office. Every new PC that comes in with Vista - wiped and XP installed. Call up MS licensing, and they generate a key for you when you tell them you are downgrading. Perfectly legal and in the eula. This way, when we finally HAVE to go to vista, the licenses are ready and waiting, since the PCs came with them.
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Vista release date Nov 8, 2006: XP release date Oct 25, 2001:
Vista at < 0.5% Dec 2006 XP at 4%, Nov 2001
Vista at 0.6% Jan 2007 XP at 6.5%, Dec 2001
Vista at 1.2% Feb 2007 XP at 9%, Jan 2002
Can't wait till the Q1 SEC reports come out, ouch!
sources:
Google zeitgeist, w3schools, wikipedia
Should Linux and Mac sales have also doubled?
/ screenshot3524/
4 7206
Um they have, but in the last couple months, not over 6 years ago sales figures..
Mac sales... From the financual page..
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual
Income Sept 30 2006 19,315,000 All numbers in thousands.
Income Sept 24 2005 13,931,000
Income Sept 25 2004 8,279,000
In two years from 2004 to 2006 the income went from 8 Billion to 19 Billion. It's not all iPod and iTunes sales.
Picking just one Lunux distro which is popular..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2276320
Since there isn't any real sales figures, I thought I would go to see if the online chatter is increasing. The Ubuntu forum is growing rapidly. "We register over 14,000 new accounts each month"
If you want a pretty graph of Linux installed base from 2000-2006, take a look here.
http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6065/1
A casual glance seems to indicate more than a doubling of the 2000 installed base figure.
Here is what a market analist has to say;
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS201
"IDC offers the following recommendations for services providers:
Open source will become business as usual in two to three years, so act today and create direct open source services offerings and embed open source in your solutions where you can"
and
"The study also reveals that open source is moving up on the investment agenda of companies worldwide, as services providers (mostly services arms of technology companies) have formalized support, training, and certification services to encourage adoption of open source (principally Linux) on their products. As open source software goes mainstream, IDC finds that services vendors must further develop open source capabilities in order to meet their clients' needs and attract new customers."
The truth shall set you free!
... I've been trying to buy a copy of Windows XP here [Brisbane, Australia] for weeks now. Pretty much every single software retail vendor that I've been to just tells me its not possible to buy it any more - they just try to foist a copy of Vista on to me.
There's a few places I can still get OEM (and a few places that seem to have old copies lying around here and there), but if you're Random McRandalot and listen to what sales people are pitching, you can't get XP any more - so why not try Vista?