40M Vista Licenses in 100 Days

Gary writes "In the first 100 days since its launch in Jan 30 Windows Vista has sold an astounding 40 million licenses. Bill Gates gives the credit to accelerating consumer shift to digital lifestyles which has made it the fastest selling operating system in history. Surprisingly the more expensive premium editions accounted for 78 percent of Vista sales. With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8 weeks to beat Mac users, 4 days to exceed Mac sales and 3 days to exceed Linux desktop users."

Comments

Article

[loconet]

Since the original link seems to have been /.'ed, here is the Reuters story on it.

400,000/day? Not really

[Red Flayer]

With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8 weeks to beat Mac users, 4 days to exceed Mac sales and 3 days to exceed Linux desktop users."

Sorry, sales/day is not a constant. MS sold 20 million Vista licenses in the first 30 days (according to MS). 70 days to sell another 20 million...

Two data points are not enough to extrapolate a curve, but I'd guess that sales as a function of time is a logarithmic curve (based on early adopters) plus a near-constant (based on replacement cycles).

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

[Red Flayer]

I'm betting they included "free upgrade to vista" offers for copies of XP sold for the year prior to vista.

Nope. They cannot state those as current-period sales, and for Gates to publically announce that they were would be grounds for FTC action. I'm sure he cleared the statement through Legal, so I'd be willing to bet those aren't included.

If he had said that 40 million licenses were issued, that would be a different story... but he said sold.

A Clarification

[Red Flayer]

Hey,
The "free" upgrades cannot be stated as sales. The discount coupons sold can be stated as sales this year -- and they were. Total deferred licensing (Vista + Office 2007) was around 1.64 Bn for Qtr 1 2007.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

[Maxo-Texas]

Except if those OS's are not running on actual PC's and generating sales of secondary software then Microsoft finally loses it's network affect benefits of being ubiquous.

Re:Still doesn't say

[AndyCR]

The lowest edition I could get with my new laptop was Home Premium.

Re:another way to fight

[disasm]

100% of the failure of linux is that it doesnt do anytthing (thats sort of an intelligence test, if you argue that linux does do something, you fail)

Well, I don't know how I failed that test... I guess being my router, my media/tv computer, my dev machine, my kitchen computer (for the recipe database), as well as running on every laptop/desktop I own to get things done counts as failure of linux. I guess I'll just have to go back to my Atari 800... And what driver is it exactly that's lacking on my 20 computers?

Sam

Dell is contributing here...

[SanityInAnarchy]

How many of those licenses are due to people buying a new Dell and deciding to go with Vista, rather than purchasing XP retail?

I mean, yes, they are forcing it on us as best they can, and there are still enough people who don't like it that Dell is giving us XP again. I really don't see a better time for Dell to ship Ubuntu, either. My recommendation to many people is: "Vista is likely to piss you off at least as much as Ubuntu is while you're learning it, and while people are rushing to release Vista-compatible versions of everything. If you're so determined to put yourself through the pain of a new OS, you may as well install Ubuntu (or Kubuntu), so that at least the next time around, you won't be paying for an upgrade."