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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.
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!
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
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
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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.
AS there were 238 Million PCs sold last year, we could take a rough calculation of 20M PCs sold per month, thus in the first ~= 4 months Vista shipped -20M copies, including pre-existing vouchers !!
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
The world's largest OEM, Dell, has begun selling PCs with Windows XP again and will soon offer PCs with Ubuntu pre-loaded. These separate, but related incidents come on the heals of complaints from Dell customers who wanted a choice after they had tried Windows Vista and discovered it sucks.
40 million licenses != 40 million Vista users.
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That hardly matters from Microsoft's perspective. They've booked the revenue. They get the income. That's the goal, remember. Tearing the numbers apart in throes of pedantic ecstasy is just masturbation.
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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.
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