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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."
In other news... China sells 40 million of it's OWN copies.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
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'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?
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That's way more than I'd ever expect! Congratulations, Gates! You must be proud that your employees each own a copy!
I hate Microsoft as much as the next man, but I'll be entertained to see how some Slashdotters twist this into being "bad for Microsoft" or something. Every other day I see some comment like "The end is here for Microsoft" or "It's all over for MS" or some such nonsense. Let's see:
1) Record profits in the last year
2) Fastest-selling OS in history
It's only getting better for them, isn't it? We need another way to fight them...
Since the original link seems to have been /.'ed, here is the Reuters story on it.
[alk]
There are 170212.766 Vista users for each Microsoft patent being violated by free software.
"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
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).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
For all practical purposes you must buy a Wondows OS when you by a PC.
(Geeks can manage it but try getting a cool VIAO or ACER which isnt preloaded with Vista!)
The interesting statistics would be how may PCs sold with Vista have been back-graded to XP?
Judging by the various blogs etc. this would seem to be the only way to get your shiny
new box to run as fast as the old one.
Google "Vista The long goodbye" Results 1 - 10 of about 907,000
So thats 5% of Vista users hacked off about just one of the Vista bugs enough to blog or cry for help.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
The true tale of Vista will be in about 18 months (from release). I know for myself, I wouldn't touch Vista until the early adopters suffer the bugs inherent in any new MS release and MS fixes them, Ditto for all the missing drivers for hardware. After this time next year Vista will have ripened and be ready for prime time and we'll get an idea of what it can really do that makes a it worthwhile upgrade over XP. If it doesn't have any advantages by then, penetration will be largely limited to newly bought PC's and MS will have to do a rethink. If it does improve and become useful, then MS will continue on as it always has, and while some may not like that, remember that no one changes a successful behaviour. For them, it has been successful, like it or not.
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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
... 95% of the world's lemmings have jumped off a cliff.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
...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.
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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
There is no Vista ? ;-)
(I stopped believing in spoons long ago)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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
Accept or Deny?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
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!"
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?
SamSomeone elsewhere pointed out that since Vista was released there have been approximately 50 million PCs sold. So, selling 40 million Vista licenses isn't that great.
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?
If naive doesn't apply to children I doubt it applies to anyone. Kids _become_ the most computer savvy people after spending time with them. The idea they will be more knowledgeable than computer scientists is so laughable as to be endearing. On the other hand, it is one of the better trolls.
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."
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."
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It's some whitespace you can use in your next post. No, don't thank me, I've got plenty.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!