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

hmm

[pak9rabid]

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?

150 million computers sold per year

[goombah99]

something like 150 million computers are sold every year. (it was 130million in 2004). And so 100 days is 27% of a year. 27% of 150 million is 41 million computers. Presumably 95% of these are Windows and sold with vista either pre-installed or a coupon for vista (which MS would count in their sold total).

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.

Re:Hmm..

[Sorthum]

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.

P.S. Activation numbers

[Overly Critical Guy]

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.