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Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China
morpheus83 writes "Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."
The irony here is that the box, the CD case, the CD itself, and the hologram were all manufactured in China along with most of the Vista-compatible hardware there is in the world.
I work for the UK's largest online retailer of PC components.
OEM XP is out selling OEM Vista by about 9:1.
Retail XP is out selling Retail Vista by about 40:1.
Acutally this is helping MS. we all know that piracy is actually what allowed MS to become the de facto and in some realms obligatory operating system. The more users you have the more developers and the more other people want it. It's a cycle and piracy was what helped get MS to the top. That's old history.
Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?
Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)
that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.
once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.
I think that's the real thing that is going on.
in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm in China, and I got sick of the pain of endless wipe/reinstall cycles with pirate windows XP. I actually called up the local rep and ordered a genuine copy of Win XP Pro. They we, so to say, ASTONISHED that someone would want a boxed retail copy. Had to special order it - took almost a week to arrive. I'd say 99%+ of Windows installs in China are pirate. Even local OEMS do it. Once it runs out of time, the normal proceedure is wipe/reinstall. Not to good for my business. But I have everyone using Macs. A rarity indeed in China.