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Vista's 40 Million License Sales In Context
Overly Critical Guy writes "Microsoft's figure of 40 million Vista OEM licenses sold has less impact when weighed against the expanded size of the PC market, according to IDC numbers. The myriad of factors involved in determining success in the market makes Microsoft's constant comparisons to Windows XP less reliable as a growth indicator — particularly with Microsoft refusing to reveal the number of actual activated Vista licenses. 'HP reported year-over-year PC sales growth of about 24 percent, or about twice worldwide PC sales growth. Whatever HP is doing right, it's more than just Vista ... If Microsoft wasn't so hung up on XP comparisons as the benchmark, it could really demonstrate that Vista sales are increasing. The first 20 million figure really represented four months of sales, and that could have been positive data because Microsoft protected its customers' holiday investments. For free! Instead of making that point, Microsoft got carried away with making comparisons back to XP.'"
I have one thing to say for microsoft selling 40 million vista licences in a week :
Well done
Because it is well done. I'm sure they're not playing entirely fair, but still, it's their success, they built it, they earned the reward for it. And it does look nice. Let them have their reward.
I'm a linux man myself. I doubt that will ever change. But I feel no need whatsoever to destroy microsoft.
If my memory serves right, this is the 7-th article talking about Vista sales alone. Not Vista bugs, not Vista speed, not Vista features, just Vista's initial sales.
I think I speak for the majority of Slashdot's readers, that we don't fucking care about Vista's sales that much.
They mean nothing and the actual trend will be known in 8-9 months from now (you can be sure Vista will see decent adoption either way, because if it doesn't Microsoft will be forced to address the worst problems in a SP).
So please stop wasting our time with this. We can live on without reading yet again about Vista's sales, in context, or out of it.
Not many on slashdot care a whole lot about Vista sales.
Even fewer care what MS marketing says about Vista sales.
Nobody cares what someone else says about what MS says about Vista sales.
Does that 40,000,000 figure count the license that was bundled with my Dell laptop? I bought my lapper in March and at the time Dell's website didn't have the option to have it pre-loaded with XP. The FIRST thing I did was wipe the hard drive and load XP, and I suspect thousands, if not millions of people have done that to the machines they've bought. Moreover, even if I wanted on my machine I would get an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate, in which case MS gets to show that they've sold two licenses to me. How many of the rest of you are in this boat?
MS is doing what they do best: marketing, marketing, marketing and not letting quality control or the facts get in the way.
Microsoft is a public company, meaning that its shares are traded by members of the public and therefore is regulated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
Therefore, Microsoft has an incentive to tell the truth about things like revenue, which would affect its stock price. If it knowingly lied, people would go to jail.
If you remember, between the time Vista was released to enterprises in the Fall of 06 and release to the public in early 07, most computer vendors offered "Free Upgrades to Vista" if you bought a PC with XP. I'd like to know how many of these "40 million licenses" were paid for and how many were free. Was MS charging a higher price for OEM XP if it came with a free upgrade to OEM Vista? Or were you getting two OS licenses for the price of one?
Then can I ask you something? Why did you click the Read More link on the front page, read the summary, click Reply, and type out an entire post if you don't fucking care? I have a much more effective solution to your problem--use the scrollbar on the right side of the window to move right past the article you don't like.
You're welcome!
"Sufferin' succotash."
I agree the sample size is ridiculous,I didn't mean to imply that the 40 million copy sold is not a valid number. It's just that I find it highly unlikely that mine was the only school in the world to receive a deal similar to mine . What I really meant to say was that although they have sold 40 million copies it doesn't mean they have 40 million users, which is the benchmark they are really after if they want widespread adoption. The example was bad.
It's all about finding better ways
Microsoft selling software is like Exxon selling gasoline. Except that Exxon has better sense than to brag about their monopoly.
But this is a case of "...methinks the lady doth protest too much..."; Microsoft is worrying about losing their monopoly to free software (linux, especially linux servers) and better software (Apple's OS). The louder they talk about market share, but more suspicious it looks.
To me, there are some other pretty important developments that have been going on, such as yesterday's report here on Slashdot about the NYSE replacing IBM mainframes with IBM AIX and with Linux.
I don't know how many people were around when Microsoft successfully spiked the Unix market with their FUD about workstation NT running on RISC processors. At the time, the Unix server and workstation companies were talking about converging their various flavors of Unix. This would have allowed more and better cross-platform compatibility of distributed application software. Microsoft countered with a campaign to run Windows NT on RISC processors as an alternative. DEC, HP and others squandered resources on this effort and the Unix market withered. Microsoft's campaign even had consulting businesses like Gartner Group predicting that NT would replace both Unix and the mainframe in a few years time. HP even went so far as to try to munge its PA RISC processor with the Intel x86 processor (Itanium) with the goal of running both x86 and Unix code on one platform. Intel never delivered on the early promises of that project, but they got HP's processor technology for their troubles.
Looking back, you have to hand it to Microsoft for the brilliant way they marginalized Unix. Problem is, they never did supply a replacement server platform except for some lousy versions of NT on Intel processors (And into that void slips Linux.)
I'm guessing that Windows XP represents the peak of Microsoft's work. Vista was years late, and the future of processors; cell, multi-core, distributed computing, internet-based applications, cell phone computers - will be beyond Microsoft's narrow, one-user/one-cpu, world view. Office productivity software has matured, gaming programming is moving onto GPUs and Microsoft's operating system is becoming less and less relevant.
Best regards.
Vista is so disappointing that even the fanboys are ignoring it and sane people are forbiding it in their work places.
Where is this mass disappointment? It doesn't exist in the normal world. Sure, there's a lot of wishful thinking, but there's not exactly huge lines outside Best Buy returning Vista. Like I said, we had EXACTLY the same stories last time. "XP is getting slow adoption", "Everybody hates XP's new crayola user interface", "Even new computer manufacturers are offering Win/2000 or ME instead of XP", blah, blah, blah. I dare you -- look at some of the old stories on Slashdot and you'll read comments just like yours.
Only free software has long term credibility.
Software is software. No one in the mainstream cares what methodology was used to develop it, they only care how useful it is and what applications are available, and whether it's compatible with the software they already have.
Vista is a flop and will soon be replaced by something else, just like ME was replaced by W2K and W2K was replaced by XP.
Microsoft would take a "flop" like Vista every day of the week.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
What planet are you from? Yes, they can say misleading things about security and interoperability, because those things are subjective. That's what marketing does, they try to make everything look as shiny as possible. But they can't lie about something that is easily and accurately measured such as sales figures. If they did that they would face some very heavy penalties, not only from the government but more importantly from the shareholders.