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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."
I'm betting they included "free upgrade to vista" offers for copies of XP sold for the year prior to vista. But how many of these people have actually claimed their free upgrade copy?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
who these licenses are being sold to. If half of them were sold to only two OEMs, its not saying much really. If even half of them were bought off the shelf at Best Buy or other stores, that would say something. So, exactly who is buying these licenses?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
"Fastest-selling OS in history"
That wouldn't have anything to do with having more computers in the world NOW versus, you know, any other point in history?
In other news, the world's human population is the highest it's ever been in history.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's a mixture of both. This is a press release by marketing to try to bolster stock prices. So when they mean licenses sold, that doesn't mean the same thing as copies purchased. It with all likelihood refers to the number of licenses they have sold to Dell and other major PC vendors, all of the free upgrade licenses from XP, all of the copies they sold to retailers (which the retailer may or may not be having luck selling), etc...
/. anti-MS pundits would have you believe, but it is a long way from the success that Microsoft's marketing department would have you believe.
Vista isn't the failure that
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I should go and take some screenshots of articles and posts saying how Vista is a failure. The same darn thing happened with XP: "OMG! no drivers! Games don't work! its so slow! doesn't work on my 266 mhz celeron!", and now the Slashdot crowd spits out quite a bit that Microsoft is a failure -except- for XP, which is semi-acceptable.
:)
Now we see with Vista? Same damn thing. "OMG no drivers, omg games, omg its slow, omg omg omg failure, I'll never upgrade from the previous version!"
Same. Damn. Thing. Hell, XP was worse: my 1 year old (at the time) lap-top had a hard time with XP, and I had paid a fortune for it. My 3 years old budget lap-top runs Vista just fine.
The only thing that can rival Microsoft's FUD, is the fud coming from thousands of geeks banded together
The facts. And the facts are the Microsoft has been deferring the count of "Vista Upgrade Certificates" until the first quarter of 2007. So a large portion of the 40 million is from Vista licenses that Microsoft has been selling for the last year.
It's also important to note that there are no figures on how many of those upgrade certificates have been cashed in for an actual copy of Vista. Which means that the number of installed Vista Desktops could be a mere fraction of the 40 million unit number that Microsoft is providing.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't take issue with the system's speed or games. I have a problem with the protected content path, and other DRM technologies integrated even further into the operating system than any part of WMP11 was integrated into XP. If I'm going to buy or use an operating system, I expect it to be made with me (the consumer) in mind, not the interests big businesses have to limit my access and restrict my fair use rights. I recently switched to a Macbook Pro because of Vista, and I must say, I'm finding that it increases my productivity quite drastically.
Can't RTFA (since appear to be /.'d), but I just wonder, how many of these licenses were sold to Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc...
And since there are no more XP, well...
...just how many copies of AOL are in circulation. Surely, the fact that it's included with just about every new PC proves AOL is a stellar success.
Kythe
Fortunately, there are articles that take a more rational view of how many copies of Vista are actually being sold.
The headline is simple, 40 million copies sold. Wow, we rox0rz! This is twice as fast as the XP adoption rate. What he didn't mention is that sales of PCs have more than doubled since XP came out. Silly Vole, no statistical cookie. The problem? Well, PCs sell at about 60 million units a quarter, and everyone we talk to expects sales of around 240-245 million units in 2007. Vista went on sale at the end of November for corporate customers, and one would expect a fair chunk of sales there from pent-up demand.
There is no such thing as slashdot group think. There are a wide variety of opinions expressed on this site, that's why I keep coming back. I think that the only reason anyone believes that stupid "group think" meme is because they believe that only someone brainwashed by group think could ever possibly disagree with them.
Get over it. People who disagree with you are not weak willed idiots infected by some "group think" mental virus.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If you read the TFA carefully, you notice that they speak about "Vista license sold".
Not "Vista License currently used to run the OS" or "machine currently running Vista in the wild".
Almost any of my non-Linux-using friends that I know to have recently changed their computer, got it with Vista pre-installed by default and had to either go through the "can I swap it for a Windows XP if I send you the media ?" procedure with the machine manufacturer or dig out one of their one "Win XP Pirate edition".
They are counted as "sold License". They don't run Vista any more.
So my interpretation of the data is :
40 * 10^6: Number of time Microsoft *sold Vista* (pre-installed on some machine at a time when the manufacturer didn't propose alternate OS)
4 : Number of users currently running Vista (and still waiting for their legal WinXP install media that they claimed from the manufacturer to come in their mailboxes).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Few MS products look good out of the gate. Then they do what we do: they listen to their users and improve their product incrementally. Same thing FOSS devs do - but we don't like to admit that because MS are evil and their products don't live up to our standards. However, they make a shit pile doing it. A company with 20 something billion in reserves and no debt is not going to go down anytime soon folks and its foolish to underestimate a juggernaut with their resources. I'm not a fanboi and I could care less how well they are doing and its silly on our part to fixate on how poorly we would like to believe they are doing. It makes us look foolish. Let's fixate on improving our own dogfood instead of listening to our own make believe FUD. Let's not stoop to their level.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
Microsoft doesn't reveal consumer and retail sales of Windows licenses, only license sales to OEMs. They did the same for Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't want people to know that retail sales are down 60% from Windows XP and that Vista demand is so low, Dell has reinstated XP as an option on its machines.
As for "beating" Mac numbers, Britney Spears also sells more CDs in a year than Mozart concerts do. If that's the kind of victory that Microsoft fanboys want to trumpet, go ahead. Meanwhile, Vista is a flop.
"Sufferin' succotash."