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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.'"
...the pirated ones? This is just a measure of copies of Vista sold. Loads of copies have been pirated (I think). Then again, XP was also pirated.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
People on Slashdot seems to care a WHOOOOOOOOOOOOLE lot when the news is abotu Vista -NOT- selling, though...
Which is of course pure bull...
Any Vista sale is just a sale that would have been XP anyways. If anything, Microsoft is losing money on this proposition since these are units they would have pushed anyways. When you're at the top of the hill, the only way you can move is down.
Microsoft is just trying to avoid the obvious conclusion that they are stagnating while milking a saturated market.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I bought a new computer the other day. I wanted something that would "just work" so after a couple of hours of screwing around with Vista I installed Linux. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the resize on the Vista NTFS partition rendered Vista unable to boot.
No loss. I have my Linux system and it just works.
I would've probably stuck with XP had the computer come with it. Adapting to the gratuitous changes in Vista was way more effort than I wanted to invest. Aside from everything being moved around, Vista had security pop-ups every time I tried to do anything. I don't believe these pop-ups really add security as they give you no meaningful option other than to say "OK."
But they sure do get in the way. Especially if you want to do unattended or remote operations, as I do frequently. Now I understand that with a few more hours research I could've probably found workarounds, but I could not get VNC to work in server mode, or sshd to install as a service.
I did not *ask* for a new, incompatible, version of Windows. It was forced on me.
Ironically, the expedient choice has now changed -- at least for me -- from just accepting the pre-installed system to installing Linux.
And the harder MS's PR department spins the figures to proclaim total success, the less people will believe Steve (Chair-throwing Steve, not Turtleneck Steve) when he calls for more DRM to stop the rampant piracy of MS intellectual property which threatens the very kind of revolutionary innovation we've seen in Vista (like a 3D accelerated Solitaire).
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
From the story: "Microsoft refusing to reveal the number of actual activated Vista licenses..."
It often seems to me that the entire job of some marketing people is to be deceitful. We can be SURE that if the number of actual activated Vista licenses was high, Microsoft would be talking about the number with everyone.
We can then suppose that the number of people actually using Vista is very low. Probably companies are buying new computers and installing their old corporate licenses of XP.
It was enormously expensive to our company to deal with the bugs in Windows XP until Service Pack 2 was released. (The cost of ownership of Windows XP SP2 is still many, many times higher than the cost of a license.) We have been burned by Microsoft many times, and are not about to get burned again with Windows Vista, so we are waiting to consider it until the second Vista service pack is released.
I'm not the only one who thinks that Microsoft is abusive, of course. Woody Leonhard of Windows Secrets, in the most recent paid edition, called himself a: "card-carrying member of the 'Association of Windows Victims' ".
Software Assurance .
How many software assurance accounts are active for Windows XP Home or Pro? If I'm not mistaken, every one of those would provide an upgrade license to some flavor of Vista. That in turn would, I'd think, be counted as a "Vista license sold."
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
The above information was obtained directly from an ex-employee of an OEM that was involved in the contract negotiations with Microsoft.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I have a vista license. Microsoft together with my school were so infinitely gracious that they decided to give away 200 licenses for CS students( keep in mind that my school payed for those licenses, they were not gifts, they were just highly discounted). Not that I know all two hundred students but the buzz is that vista is crap, and I personally don't know anyone who installed it and didn't revert to XP.` SO of those 40 million copies, how many are real users? I can't help but to wonder.
It's all about finding better ways
First, Mac has been steadily eating into the PC market for the last 3 years with notable gains in Laptop share. Tim Oreilly stated (for better or worse) "watch the Alpha-geeks". The Alpha geeks at RSA, Java One and other conferences are largely using Mac laptops. At a recent code challenge at Java One 2007, my observation during one heat was all but one of the contestants were on Macbook Pro's.
The second item is a statistic I read somewhere stating that in the next decade, about 50% or more of the people connecting to the internet for the very first time, will do so via a wireless device as opposed to a laptop, desktop. MS has made huge strides into the portable device market but has serious competition there.
Me? I want my iPhone the day they arrive in Canada.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
People seem to have forgotten that Fedora was crowing about 7 Million actual verified installations recently. This was of Fedora Core 6 (from October of last year to March, IIRC).
Suddenly, that 40 Million number doesn't look so good. Even if you give MS the widest possible doubt and assume that there were 40 Million Vista activations (ha!), gosh, that means that Fedora alone has about 20% of the new O.S. market.
And that's not even including Ubuntu, Suse and the other distros.
No, when you start looking at the numbers for new systems, it looks like Microsoft is in deeper trouble than they are admitting.
And this probably explains why they are panicing and starting their Patent FUD campaign.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
I'm runnng Vista on 2 work machines and 2 of my home machines. It needs more ram than XP. It's prettier. My Hp 7150 doesn't work with Vista. Getting CCCP setup in Vista media center is easier than it was on XP Media Center.
My 4 year old work laptop sleeps/wakes/hibernates faster and much more reliably than it did under XP.
None of my Vista installs were OEM. The two home machines are stuff i built out of newegg orders.
I'm sure none of my Vista installs count in the "40m sold" figure, since I'm an MS employee.:)
That said, Vista does show up in retail boxes on store shelves at places like Best Buy, and it does sell.
I think it's worth mentioning that during the latest earnings disclosure, part of our increased (beat the street) numbers were due to better than expected vista sales. You can be as cynical as you want, but at some point, stretching the truth too much gets you in trouble with the SEC, and the guys that sit on the golden toilets at wallstreet are at least as good as the average slashdotter at wading through the marketing to pick out the reality.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Microsoft is a self-destructive organization. What I mean is that their whole company persona is one of negativity and threats against their users, and those that don't use them. Only one type of company threatens those that don't use their product--a self-destructive one. It would be like the gas companies calling you thieves because you use the gasoline of another company that maybe copied your process for processing gasoline (which by the way you probably copied years ago). With the new rules for determining prior art for patents much of what Microsoft says is essentially toothless, but it does damage--it harms the reputation of those involved in something great--Linux.
Microsoft is where it is because of some rather unsavory tactics and now they are using those same deceptive practices to make it seem like their product is more successful than it is. As well, they are trying to create a fervor in those that might be looking at others and want to be like them. They are creating an artificial fervor in order to create a "I want to be like the Joneses".
In reality what should be happening is that people should be using the products that protect their privacy, products don't spy on them; and never will. This invasion of privacy, the threats against consumers, the lies about their success, and the constant theft of IP from other organizations is just a bit too much, and if the average consumer understood what was happening they would not be buying Microsoft products.
With their veiled threats against Linux users, which is being done to extort companies into cross licensing of IP is nothing more than them trying to steal their IP without outright stealing it and then ending up in court. They are threatening the community to force certain companies that would never cross license with Microsoft into giving up their IP--and in reality that's just extortion and an attempt to get the IP they normally would have just stolen and fought about in court. But since they loose so many cases they had to change their tactics. As well, since the new Supreme Court ruling on what is included in how to determine "prior art" Microsoft is about as desperate as one would guess. They are not an innovative company, they just don't innovate.
This is a very self-destructive pattern for them...
And to hear a Microsoft cronnie claiming that 2007 is the year of the death of Open Source is just pathetic. That individual would have been dumped by a regular company but instead he's paraded about inside Microsoft as some master tactician.
2007/2008 will show growth in Linux and Open Source equal to or better than all prior years of its growth. He can take that to the bank.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Microsoft not releasing the activation numbers is a sure sign that they are not good.
Beyond that, things even look less rosy. Yes there are plenty of places that have Vista licenses and have not bothered to load them, xp woks just fine.
My own personal antidote, I deal with 4 machines (laptops) that came with Vista. My wifes laptop at home, she could only put up with it for about 2 weeks. She dual boots Ubuntu and XP. With the XP only used for popcap games.
At work, there is my laptop, which now runs only Ubuntu, my boss, who has called Dell, and got a license to run XP on it. There is one other laptop with Vista, we have just been to lazy to get a license for it, but if it does anything flaky, it will get a nuke and pave. Since then we have ordered 3 other laptops...all with XP.
So of 4 activated Vista systems, only 1 is actually still Vista.
So with people who are not installing Vista but have a license, people given the OEM coupons, and people who are leaving Vista for Xp/linux. I would not be surprised if actual Vista adoption is as low as 10 million.
Microsofts most effective antipiracy measure yet, has been the quality of Vista. People just don't want to run it.
The fact that people don't even want to pirate it is a bad sign for Micosoft.
vi +
Monopoly doesn't mean no competition at all. It means no substantial competition. Gates does not live in fear that he'll wake up tomorrow with only 10% of the market. Linux and MacOSX are not substantial competition. They're minorities. Windows is on 90% of computers, and that qualifies as a monopoly. Also, as the other responder noted, the software you buy off the shelf is usually for the Windows API. I've never seen software at Best Buy that said it was Linux compatible. I've downloaded plenty of free stuff from the repositories, but most commercial games are Windows-only. Most very-high-end specialty software is too. MacOSX can compete when it comes to running specialty software. It can't on commercial games. Linux can't compete on either of those unless developers start paying attention to it. It can only compete on "general computer use" by which I mean things like chatting, email, web-surfing, writing up reports, balancing a checkbook, tracking a family tree, listening to music, etc. Most people only do that (or a subset of it), and could get along with Linux just fine. Try finding a Linux box on the shelf at a computer store though. They're all running Vista (or MacOSX if you go to an Apple Store). You have to order online if you want a Linux box, and most people don't do that. Yeah, Dells are almost always online, but even if they're the largest retailer (not anymore, HP passed them), when you split that even 5 ways (Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, IBM, for instance), that just means "more than 20%," and that doesn't account for all the other retailers.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux