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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.
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