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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."
Ah, looks like another game of 'defer the revenues from a more successful quarter to a less successful quarter'. Didn't yall get in trouble w/the SEC for doing that?
i'd like to see if they guess-timated / inflated the enterprise licenses number....
A: "let's see here....2000 companies with an enterprise license....let's count them at 10,000 individual ones"
B: "brilliant"
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
There's another catch. Since Vista's inception, my company has bought several hundred Dell boxes(with Vista preloaded). However, we don't use Vista, we still use XP because we don't trust Vista with our network...
... but you do have to remember MS gave away Vista upgrade vouchers to folk buying XP through Q4 last year. I wonder how many of these 40M licenses are really XP purchasers claiming their Vista disks?
Anyway, if the claim is true MS must be breathing a sigh of relief, given all the "no one wants to upgrade to Vista" talk on the internet. (Of course, we heard the same during the 9x/2k->XP and NT->2k transition as well). Still, if you're a user with existing hardware and files, hold off upgrading! It's the sensible thing to do.
Go somewhere random
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39 636
Given that 60 million PCs were sold during that timeframe, it seems a lot those came without Vista.
You forget so soon! XP Pre SP 2 is a zombie node waiting to happen.
You are using the term XP to mean XP, XP SP1 and XP SP2 & since all the updates.
XP is only acceptable because of all of the work Microsoft has done post release to bring it about.
Vista is *currently* a pos. Not SP1 through 14, but Vista today.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
apparently I may account for two of those, although I have never actually registered for my two upgrades to be sent to me... Microsoft still got to count two as having been sold to the OEM... I bought to new machines at the end of January deliberately to avoid Vista... I wiped XP off both of them and put Ubuntu on them... it galls me that Microsoft still gets to count them...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This seems to be the most common complaint here on /. and I have to say I just don't see it in Vista. None of my thousands of gigs of music, movies, documents, or CD images of games and apps have failed to work. If there's some sort of DRM nightmare hidden in Vista, I can't find it. I guess you could say that the "features" exist to implement DRM on content (they're there in XP too), but does anyone think there's a threat of one day waking up and finding that an update has restricted all of your media? It's just not going to happen, guys.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Except what do you gain from Vista?
Most people moved from Windows 98 to XP. They gained a much more secure system in that move and moved to the proven NT kernel from the 95/98/ME codebase.
The move to Vista? I see little gain but eye candy. DirectX 10 may be a big deal and the move from GDI could be important to some people but unlike the move from 98 to XP there is little to gain.
XP to Vista is about as good of a move as from 98 to ME.
Vista is such a small improvement that I am seeing wide spread interest in Linux for the first time. The FAA and NASA are both not jumping onto Vista.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The sales numbers include upgrade vouchers and workstation counts for volume license holders like schools and Enterprise customers. Of note, after the first month Microsoft claimed 20 million Vista licenses sold. That means for each month after 10 million licenses were sold (half). I should also note that of the Volume license customers, almost no one is deploying Vista. I have been to various tech conferences the past few months where this question has been posed to various business attendees. Everyone says they aren't deploying it for at least a year. I know of one small liberal arts college that is the exception to this. I should also note that many enterprise and especially education customers are ordering lots of PC's with Vista licenses attached. They then image them with their XP image via Ghost, Zenworks, LanDesk, etc. If vendors were allowed by Microsoft to sell PC's with Linux or without an OS you would see this number much smaller. I should also note that Microsoft's Volume License agreement doesn't allow you to install your volume licensed copy of Windows on a computer without an OS or with Linux. This means when a school who has purchased Windows Volume licenses from Microsoft is required to purchase PC's with a Windows license included. This amounts to Microsoft selling two copies of Windows per Volume license seat. As to the statement that most licenses sold have not been Home basic, almost all PC's are shipping with Home Premium and volume license customers are getting Vista Business or Vista Enterprise licenses.
This really isn't a battle, as both "sides" of the argument can be more or less correct at the same time.
Vista might be the most problematic upgrade cycle ever in the history of Microsoft, in terms of slow user adoption.
However, the market continues to grow and has grown a lot since the last upgrade cycle, and the vast majority of desktop general purpose computers run Microsoft systems, and the vast majority of new systems will soon or already do ship with Vista pre-loaded. Therefore, Vista will soon be a raging success for Microsoft and within a year or two the majority of Windows systems will be running Vista.
The more interesting question is how successful will the spammers and botmasters be at migrating to the new platform? Will the Vista migration result in a reduction of rootable home user systems on the net? Will the percentage of email which is spam decline, or continue to rise?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
So not only are the stats utterly unsuprising, but when you consider that the biggest surges in computer sales happen in the vicinity of christmass then 40 million copies of vista is severley lagging what one would have expected just from new computer sales alone.
It's interesting to note that the large fraction of pro-edition sales. This suggests IT department purchases or pro-user purchases. These are the early adopter crowd. Logically, this early adopter crowd is a one time surge.
Thus the the 40 million is under-following the general trend in New PC sales. Infact there's negative growth since something is offsetting the expected plus up in the early purchase rate one expected from early adopters and christmass sales. The logical conlcusions is twofold
1) corporate fleets are not adopting it or are otherwise delaying new computer purchases.
2) essentially NO ONE besides the early adopters experts is buying this to replace XP on existing machines.
Since Vista is supposedly harder to pirate than XP it wold seem that this can't be blamed on piracy either.
in short 40M/100 days is absysmal.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How many are being used? Isn't that the real question. How many of those people got the new PC and put XP on it? How many loaded linux or BSD? Not every computer shipped with Windows runs that version of Windows. IT people might have bought a site license to run Vista Business but bought Vista home, etc. Everybody get out your jump to conclusions board.
Selling != using
So the claim that Vista users will out pace Mac or Linux users so quickly is not true. Its not even possible to get an accurate number on that. I didn't RTFA, but I also wonder what Mac OS sales figures they are using. Are they just comparing 10.4 sales to vista? Are they comparing Mac hardware sales? I upgraded my laptop to 10.4. Is that in there? Not all my Macs even run Mac OS. I have one running OpenBSD exclusively.
How are they comparing Linux users? Is it redhat and suse sales? If so, that's a very small percentage of total linux users.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Exactly, in the Netherlands at least only the lowliest computers are sold with basic by default. All the others run Premium. Hell, even a 800 euro laptop comes with Premium nowadays. so the high percentage of Premium sales says nothing at all. Actually, it might be that the Basic version disappears from desktops altogether, because nobody might buy these computers without Premium. It's more that Basic is for loosers, and all the other guys get Premium, than that Premium is the odd one out.
It's not this quarter that matters. It is the next two quarters and even the year on.
People have stopped talking about the spying and invasion of privacy Microsoft has been doing so word has stopped getting around. People are beginning to think it is ok to have a company such as Microsoft protect itself at our expense.
Listen even if someone is nearly murdered by someone that victim doesn't have the right to take the law into their own hands at the expense of society. So, even if you think it is ok to have Microsoft spying on you and invading your privacy they don't have the right. They should be going through the Police authorities to deal with it. Even then, the Police authorities have no right to invade your privacy without warrants issued by the court and signed by a judge.
Not to mention, it will be a rude wake up call when people are not able to play back their content or get their computer shut down because of Microsoft's stupid mistakes. And to facilitate spying on me by other vendors is criminal.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"it never was, never was meant to be and never will be a mass market operating system used by the naive users."
I believe a few million children will soon be disagreeing with you
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Microsoft is stacking the channel as this article points out http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/stack ing_vista_licenses_too_high.html
They previously counted XP sales after leaving the sales channel (installed on a machine) instead of just going out to retailers and they included upgrade coupons. So all of that floating inventory that is "in the sales channel" is counting as sales.
They also didn't account for higher sales of PCs.
If you were buying a PC and you could get XP or Vista installed on it, which would you choose. Now if you don't have a choice, then it's a Vista sale, though not a willing one.
I also work for a college, albeit on the Unix side.
Last I recall, we had Software Assurance or whatever they're calling their upgrade program. Long story short, we can install Vista on all 6000 of our machines. We don't actually run it on more than 100 right now, but we technically are licensed to do it, by virtue of our site license that we pay MS for every year.
I'm quite sure that they look at our licensing tier, say "They can go up to 10K machines on this license, so we'll mark them down as 10K Vista licenses sold."
It's easy as anything to play the numbers game, depending on what premises you accept.
Remember, every PC sold by most of the major vendors include a license (regardless of the OS eventually used on it)... What would be more important is the numbers of unique activations.... Where's that number? 4,000? 40,000? 400,000? Let's see that number (with the info to back it up)... Otherwise this is just optimistic marketing drivel.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Still, I think the sobriquet "groupthink" is demeaning to the slashdot culture and the people who create that culture. It implies that weak willed people are swayed to think a certain way by the group. The truth is that people who think a certain way choose to stay and contribute more frequently than people who think oppositely. Few here express opinions just to fit in, rather, they had those opinions already and have stayed at a place where those opinions are welcomed.
Perhaps that is all that is really meant by "groupthink." But the connotations of the word are different. Let's analyze this according to the causes and symptoms of groupthink as listed at wikipedia.
Untrue. Slashdot is not cohesive. the members are not particularly close.
Untrue. Outside experts are welcomed and rewarded consistently for their contributions.
Strong Leadership? Don't make me laugh.
All completely untrue. The leadership is nondirective, our backgrounds and ideology are diverse, and the site is about outside sources of information.
Point 1 doesn't exist here. Point two happens on occasion, for instance warnings about Linux or Mac security might be met with skepticism. Point three happens on occasion i.e. "Information wants to be free and so does my entertainment." Point four, well, I can't decide. Are Gates and Balmer as evil as people here make them out to be? Maybe I'm already too influenced by groupthink to make an unbiased judgment here. Points five & six are the points you propose to address in your experiment, and I think you may be right, moderation acts as a pressure to conform and may shut down ideas that deviate from the apparent consensus. I don't think there is any illusion of unanimity here, not least because of all the shouting about "groupthink." I also don't see anything much
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
OK, I estimate that PC sales for 2007 are going to be around 75 million units in the U.S. and about 225 million units world wide. If you take 3 months of this, it would be about 19 million PCs sold in the U.S. and about 55 million world wide. So if you estimate that 80% of all those units sold will have Vista on it, you get about 40 million units total. Humm...
Now compare this to 2001 when XP came out. PC sales back then were about 55 million in the U.S. and 125 million world wide and you can see that XP wouldn't have come close in sales during its first three months.
What that tells me is that Microsoft is using the expansion in world wide PC sales as an way to promote how well Vista is going. But considering there isn't an upgrade path to Vista (thanks to greatly increased hardware requirements) like there was with XP, I'm sure these sales will level off.
I forgot to mention this. Microsoft refuses to give out the figures for Vista's WGA activation. That would give a good estimate of the actual number of users running Vista. I know Microsoft enthusiasts are absolutely desperate to spin any positive press for the Vista debacle, but it just doesn't fly with people anymore.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Where to start..
.wmas, all of which are DRM'd and playable only through Windows Media Player... it also doesn't matter. WMP11 won't install unless you pass it's built in WGA check, leaving you with... either a functional WMP11, or a functional WMP10.
Firstly, your analogy sucks. You can't really compare murder to product activation. You... just can't. They are two, very different things. "Taking the law into your own hands" when someone you know was murdered is not even related to invasion of privacy. I can't even see how that would be remotely related.
Second, let's talk about the three things which are clearly irking you: product activation, Windows Genuine Advantage, and the numerous programs (say, Windows Media Player for example) that are locked with WGA.
Product activation... sends your product key in a secure fashion over the internet (or phone) and allows Microsoft to verify that you are actually using a legit copy of Windows. The only way I can see this as invasion of privacy and not being legal is in the sense that you feel any required contact with Microsoft shouldn't happen, when in reality, you clicked the "I Agree" button to the license, which in fact states that Microsoft can do anything they want to your computer running Windows, at any time they want. You may disagree with that, and many do, but you did push the "I Agree" button in the end.
WGA is another beast, which again, many people dislike. Fortunately, when you run windows update, you're given the option of installing it. Yup. Uncheck that little checkbox, and hey, it won't be installed. Good stuff. It even gives you an option to ignore that update in the future. Even if you do install this, it should be noted that it doesn't report back to Microsoft. So, again, no invasion of privacy. If you consider it to be one, don't install it.
Now, if you have many
Even if you install WGA and it flags your license as "Not Genuine" - all that it will do is annoy you. No fuctionality will be disabled - your computer will continue to function. It will not "get their computer shut down" and nor is it "spying on [you] by other vendors."
I'm really curious where you get this "invasion of privacy" bit, when A) you accepted the license in the first place, and B) the real problems you have with it, are not only easily circumvented, but Microsoft gives you the tools to "circumvent" it out of box.
Two months ago I was working as a consultant with a Durable Medical Equipement company. It's a small business, 7 employees and about a 800k in sales a year. Their computer system and software was still running on DOS. (at least server end) and as they were going for new accredidation they realized the old software just wasn't going to make the requirements. The software company was still in business and we chatted with their support team a couple times and they expressly told us "THIS SOFTWARE WILL NOT WORK WITH VISTA". This was back in January. They liked dealing with Dell. I'm a Mac guy myself, but in these kind of situations, one is stuck with the option of windows...or windows. They were a small business and about half their sales is through public aid. Anyone dealing with the government knows that you'll get your money....eventually. They were waiting for a payment to come in before they had the extra cash to purchase the server, two new workstations, and software. In total it was about $15,000. ($10,000 of that being the software). They didn't get their check until March. By then Dell wasn't selling anything but Vista on their machines and the software vendor hated dealing with HP (so much so that they simply don't.) I don't do service contracts. I simply provide advice acting more like a CTO to small businesses helping them sort through the FUD and answer any questions...and tell them when the sales people are full of *#$&#. Personally I told them to go with DELL because they were the only ones I knew would still be around in five years to offer support. But what was the install options on the new workstations? Well Vista and um....vista. So we ended up buying the entire system through Gateway. Not my first choice for several reasons, but they still offered PC's with XP pre-installed. Install went without a hitch and we sent the old box out to the company's lab to recover all 20 years worth of records and it was the first time I have ever done a major system port without loosing a single record. Frankly that was one of the smoothest transitions on that end. But still Dell was doing their same old game of "Only the latest Operating system from MS." and that cost them a sale. I got a lot of calls from businesses asking, "Do I need Vista?" With the chances that some of their software won't run, my answer was (and still is) no. Stick with XP at least for another year. You don't buy an MS OS until Service Pack 1 is released. It's just like my true mac head friends that want to preorder the iPhone today or purchased an AppleTV. There is no way in hell I'm buying the first generation of anything Apple. (That being said, I've been using a Mac Mini with LCD TV since it has a DVI plug in for almost a year now). I've been cut enough times, that I stay behind the bleeding edge these days.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I must admit I am not the biggest fan of Microsoft's historic dodgy and wholly untested releases but you guys seem to have a real problem with Microsoft. I like anyone else enjoy and wholly support open source progression but i fail to understand the constant barrage of criticism against the MS OS's. Why? If Linux was so successful then it would be competing at the level that MS is - it has improved, is more user friendly and more widely supported and handled by private companies such as Red Hat but still MS are the top dog. Has it ever occured that if other OSs had the same level of usability and usefulness as XP/Vista etc then free market force would have come into effect and they would be competing? The fact remains that MS OS's are the best across all areas of the computing spectrum - that fact is plain and simple. Half the guys on this site have the approach of a poor politician by trying to potray factual figures differently. Even if 50 million PCs have been deployed since the sale of 40 million lienses and MS has a monopoloy - they had to get there from scratch in the first place - much where Linux is now. You all sound so incredibly jealous of MS's success yet have no factual basis to support any of your claims. Why is it that everyone is obsessed with MS bashing?
Remember, these are sales of OS versions.
Everyone who, like my entire shop, buys One Linux License and installs the same configuration on all 100 servers, counts as One Sale.
Everyone who buys a Windows laptop and then installs Ubuntu Linux on top of it, counts as a Windows install, but NOT as an Ubuntu sale (since most just got the disks from cheapbytes.
Everyone who buys a Mac laughs at the Windows installs, since they live virus-free anyway.
Those who believe statistics without analyzing the underlying precepts, are doomed to live in an artificial world that does not resemble reality. Have fun with your pretty unicorns, but don't be upset if I harsh your mellow.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all. The Software Assurance is issued in 3-year intervals, and since it was introduced in 2001, many companies have re-signed Software Assurance plans in 2004 and recently in 2006/2007. In fact, this was one of the driving factors behind The November '06 release of Vista: Microsoft quelled unrest in their biggest customers by releasing Vista before their Software Assurance plans ran out.
The fact is, very few companies are going to drop their Software Assurance contracts, and since every single SA contact comes with a Vista Enterpeise license (it is the only way to get one, according to Microsoft), I wouldn't be surprised at all if Microsoft counted every re-signed SA contract in their numbers.
I've been wondering this whole time where MS was getting their numbers, but now it all makes sense. What also makes sense is how Microsoft posted huge profits for this quarter: lots of re-signed SA contracts, plus SOME genuine sales of Vista (with new accounting practices, the entire profit from the sale is applied to only this quarter, instead of the software lifetime).
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
True. A download is not automatically a use. But so far, I have not seen Linux being force-fed to anyone when they bought a new computer. Also, you only have to download it once to use it how many times you wish to use it.
Yes, not everyone who downloads it will use it for longer than a test period. Many people download it, try it, find out it's not their kind of system (or just not their kind of distri) and move on. There are, though, just as many people who download it once and use it multiple times.
So I'd guess it's safe to say that one download = one use. A bunch of people will download and not use it, some others will download once and use it multiple times. Since it's kinda impossible to determine how many of each breed exist, I'd assume that they hold a balance, at least 'til some more reasonable way to determine it can be found. Linux distris don't phone home, and I certainly wouldn't want them to just for bragging rights.
MS on the other hand should have a fairly good idea just how many of the licenses sold are actually in use. Every single one sold and used HAS to phone home and be activated. Funny enough, we get numbers of licenses sold, but not of licenses activated.
Wonder why...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think it's pretty safe to say that Linux users understand the Windows demographic because of its ubiquity (we all use it sometime), but the reverse is not true (most never tried Linux, others didn't stick with it long enough). You have demonstrated this lack of understanding right now.
I am posting this comment FROM LINUX (or rather, from Firefox on Linux). It is my MAIN OS, and it's been that way since 1999. I dual boot into Windows 98 for some old games I have, which should tell you how often I use Windows for my own use. Back in '99, a couple of my friends had already started to switch to Linux which influenced me as well (plus I was trying to run the old 3D program Moonlight Creator/Atelier which ran on Linux). Notice how Linux users often are born out of exposure to other Linux users? Linux users aren't rare nor are they isolated exceptions to the rule, only Linux commercial sales figures make it seem that way.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who hardly know anything other than Windows just can't understand why other OS's are compelling. Computers aside, there is a demographic of people that are do-it-yourselfers. They like learning. They like control over the products they use. They like their freedom. They like feeling they can trust those who make the product and that the product itself isn't purposedly designed to monitor them or get in their way of work and play. They aren't timid towards technology. These type of people are not rare, and it's not like you haven't met someone like this. These are the types of people that run Linux, open source BSD Unices, etc.
If you take offense that people are cynical towards Windows sales figures, I agree that people need to care more about truth than knee-jerk reaction. Unfortunately, most retorts motivated by the need for retribution miss their mark frankly because most Windows people really don't understand anything about the libre/open-source software community and the software they use.