Slashdot Mirror
Vista Sales Rate Fell Last Quarter
Microsoft is not directly mentioning Vista demand while they brag about how much money they made last quarter, because sales fell. "[Microsoft] shipped approximately 28 million copies of Vista in the latest quarter ended September, or 9.3 million copies per month. Though the Windows developer pointed to 27 percent growth in business licenses and noted that many home users were buying the more lucrative Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions, the rate represents a decline from the 10 million per month reported early in summer."
Now, some of that breakage is the result of improved security, but our Windows driver guy tells me that the disruption caused by the security causes a lot of users to just disable the security.
Also, I understand that MS provided a version to a few top-tier OEMs that didn't require product activation by end users, so as not to annoy them. This resulted in a crack being written by the w4r3z community that doesn't require activation at all! (look for it on a p2p network near you.) The product activation is very sensitive to hardware changes, more so than XP, so that legitimate users get no end of hassle from Vista, while pirates aren't inconvenienced at all.
Surely Microsoft must have had some regular people beta test Vista. And surely some - maybe all - of these people must have told MS that Vista shouldn't ship in the state it's in.
My wife is thinking about getting a new laptop. I said to her "Make sure you don't get Vista, it's really screwed up" and you know what she said? "Oh, yeah I know. Apple runs these TV ads with a young guy who's supposed to be a Mac, and a guy who looks like Bill Gates who's supposed to be a PC. And whenever they try to talk to each other, this Secret Service agent interrupts them to make sure it's OK."
Remember the Twiggy drive? Apple tried to manufacture their own floppy disk drive for the Apple II. They were never able to get it to work. There was a big shareholder lawsuit. I could really see a shareholder lawsuit coming from Vista. Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty - that means they're legally obligated - to look after shareholder interests. And Billy and Steve Balmer really screwed up.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
No. There's a brief surge of 'back-to-school' sales in August, and then a small decline, with Christmas sales starting to pick up around Halloween. It's followed that pattern for a very long time.
My blog
Then there's the enterprise & semi-server stuff like ability to join a domain and IIS, but if you're considering Ultimate against HP, that's probably not relevent to you.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
You should reclaim money for every single licence you don't use.
1. To save money
2. Not to fund MS.
So basically, sales volume dropped 7%. They *only* sold 9.3 million copies, instead of the 10 million they sold in summer. While this article is an attempt to go "ha ha" to Microsoft, I think that's pretty darned good.
Also consider that a rather large shopping season is right around the corner. Consumers will be rushing to upgrade their computers for the family, and businesses will be looking to spend some cash to get bigger tax breaks.
Microsoft also cooled it on the advertising for the last quarter. They have a new campaign which is just now starting, and I predict the money they *didn't* spend last quarter will be given to the Q4 advertising budget.
-David
What I don't understand is that XP is still expensive. In fact, it looks to be about the same price as Vista. I figured I'd pick up a copy of XP for a few bucks somewhere, but at over $100 dollars it just isn't worth it for something that I'd just be using to build software on and do debugging.
If Vista sales were really as bad as Slashdot and its readers would like you to believe, then Microsoft would have been hammered by Wall Street.
Think about it. A massive percentage of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows. (With most of the rest coming from Office.) If Vista sales were bad, or even a just a little under what was expected, Microsoft's stock would take a hit.
But, funny enough, that's exactly the opposite of what happened last week. Microsoft's stock is up about 10%. And that's a HUGE deal for a company as mature and with such a huge market cap as Microsoft.
Now, granted, Vista sales aren't the only thing that can affect Microsoft's stock price. There was lots of good news for Microsoft. Windows Server market share is increasing (at what just so happens to be almost exactly the pace at which Linux server market share has decreased in recent months), their "entertainment" group (aka Xbox) posted their 2nd profit (thanks to Halo 3), and Office sales are awesome.
But the fact remains that Vista sales are meeting or beating expectations. Virtually all Vista sales happen via new PC purchases, and those were higher than expected for most of the year... thanks to, you guess it, Vista.
Since we're just pre-holiday season right now, PC sales tend to drop a bit... and that's what happened. (And please note that the sales RATE dropped, yet overall sales are still higher than last year at this time.) To say that this drop was caused by Vista is, put simply, retarded.
Check the parent poster's history before you call him a "M$ Fanboy".
Then again, there's no room in the Cult of Twitter for wishy-washy rational arguments. I guess he really is a "M$ Fanboy" because he isn't complete and perfect in his hate.
Your irrational behavior makes the rest of us look bad by association. You have negative karma for a reason, and it's not the "astroturfers" of your paranoid delusions.
Actually, I've been a tech for over 20 years. And I DO have a machine that I CAN rip out the video card, or network card, or whatever, with no adverse effects to the OS or hardware... this particular machine (one of numerous models) is an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10. But here are the relevant points that refute your statement. (1) It's a function of the HARDWARE, BIOS, (IBM's add-on software and updates for the OS), and DRIVERS, (2) That feature is supported on numerous NON-VISTA OS's... if the HARDWARE, ETC supports it (the feature is supported under far earlier versions of Windows than Vista, as well as OS/2 and now, I think Linux as well for my machine - for EVERY PCI and PCI-X slot).
On the machines that DONT support it (which is many non-high end server machines... such as what you'd buy retail), removing the card will either shut down the machine, hang the machine, damage the machine or numerous other things faaaar different than what you claim will happen. While a few of the newer buses support such a feature, it is still HARDWARE, DRIVER and BIOS allowing it, and NOT locked to Vista, and in NO WAY an indication of stability in Vista - NOR a feature specific to Vista.
Get your facts straight.
I could go on in length about the rest of your post, but dont feel like wasting my time... perhaps later when I am bored.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
This is FUD.
Leopard's minimum system requirements are an 867MHz G4 and 512MB RAM. The CPU requirement is realistic; the RAM requirement should be 1GB. An 867MHz 1GB system will run Leopard very satisfactorily. A comparable system will run Vista, but not Aero, and it will be dog slow. (I have found Vista useless with less than 2GB RAM.)
As for RAGE 128 issues, those are only to be expected -- no machines that came stock with a RAGE 128 meet Leopard's requirements (unless they had aftermarket CPU upgrades). A comparable card would likely have trouble under Vista too, because no one would bother to write compatible drivers, although I haven't tried it.
Interestingly, Leopard's cut-off hardware is less powerful than Vista's "Home Basic recommended system". The Home Premium requirements are *much* higher than Leopard. if you have an older Mac with a RAGE 128 video for example, several applications just fail to run at all. The same is true for Vista. In fact, you lose out on more OS-level features by using a RAGE 128 on Vista than you do using one on Leopard.
You're promoting an odd position--that Leopard runs slower than Vista. Speaking from *personal* experience with *both* systems on the *exact same* hardware, I can tell you that, hands-down, the *opposite* is true.
Have you run both?
* It doesn't require a full OS reinstall if I want to get a feature added in the latest version. On Windows, you can't get ClearType without upgrading to XP. On Linux all you need is to update the necessary components and everything else stays the same
That one, I'd have to disagree with. I tried updating KDevelop ahead of the other KDE components in my system, and apt-get insisted it needed to download 450MB of packages to update, well pretty much everything, and everything that depended on that again. Maybe it's the package maintainers being too strict about requirements but in practise, it's not possible unless you want to fuck with the distro's packaging sytem by rolling your own and all that drags along with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
ask Microsoft!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1441240
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I can confirm that the DRM stuff is pure FUD. You are thinking of the paper written by peter someone at Auckland University. He used such worthwhile sources of information as anonymous posts on online forums for his data. Lots of places use his paper as evidence that vista is crap, but more serious analysis has shown just how shoddy his paper is.
Vista does have more bells and whistles which do slow the system down somewhat. Also ATI and NVidia have had issues getting drivers to perform as well as they do in XP - their developers have had to learn a whole new architecture. Only recently are they catching up...
Yes, vista does throttle the network somewhat when media player plays MP3s. This is a silly, silly design decision to compensate a problem some users may sometimes have. And to compound that a bug means the network is throttled much more than is necessary. This bug is fixed in SP1 (I beleive) and due to the bad press they got I wouldn't be surprised if MS revisit the while network throttling. I hope they do.
I use vista, and there is plenty I don't like about it, but the DRM FUD pisses me off. Yes, vista does support some new DRM features. No, those DRM features are not applied to any of the media you are using today. Vista has performed as well or better than XP for me when ripping, downloading, playing and copying movies.
The network speed drops were related to something the audio subsystem was doing, the MS official line was that it was to make audio playback more stable or something like that but people had hardly been complaining about the state of audio in XP. So rightly or wrongly people blamed the DRM related additions to the audio engine.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Can anyone confirm this?
I can confirm it is wrong. If you aren't using DRM-encumbered media, none of Vista's DRM systems will be active.
I don't use Vista and wouldn't recommend most people would, at least until hardware catches up, and Vista SP2.
However, lots of FUD has spread about Vista:
If my system is running DRM, it uses more CPU power when I do anything with video. So i use Win2k on my render machines.
First of all DRM takes a toll on your HDMI enabled hardware, and less so on your CPU. You buy more expensive hardware for the extra chip and protection to do the crypting.
But there's no DRM applied to plain video. It's simply not, never was (can't say never will).
Second, rendering video is even less relevant to playback of DRM-ed video. DRM in Vista means absolutely nothing for your rendering machines.
I simplified my rant too much apparently. In general terms, Vista uses more system resources no matter what you are doing than XP or Win2k. The more free resources, the better the system runs applications. on the DRM issue, i'll just give you a few links to follow, ok? here is one on how Vista DRM causes system slowdown no matter what you are doing; The next related issue is with Distributed rendering, or rendering a animation on several network machines at the same time. While there is a fix for both these issues(that a lot of people are reporting doesn't work), the Vista DRM system has been linked to slowdowns in copying files, and reducing network speed to about 5% of normal; you can read about that here. There is also a issue that hasn't been fully nailed down yet where whenever you access a "registered" codec (like, you know, when you are rendering?) the DRM system on Vista goes nuts and slows things down. that particular error only seems to be effecting some some people and not others, andd has not been conclusively proven to be DRM/Vista related. yet.
I also like to play games. The less bullshit my computer has to deal with in the way of DRM, non-needed glitz & glow, the better it will run games. So I use Win2k for games, and sometimes run them on my Windows XP MCE laptop.
Again DRM, no DRM is applied from Vista on *games*. DirectX adds new shader capabilities which game producers may opt to use or not use. If they use them it's to make games look better.
Or you'll tell me now you prefer games look same as in the pre-DirectX days.
Some pre-directX games are pretty darn nice in the graphics department, and I would prefer OpenGL to DirectX in general, but that isn't what I was talking about. I wasn't specifically implicating DRM in making games slow, it was more the "Vista uses more system resources" thing I mentioned above; the less resources your system uses to just sit there, the more it has for applications. There is also that whole "DRM system polling every piece of hardware 30 times a second" thing; I have to think that, on comparable systems, the one NOT doing that would be a bit faster.
Essentially, unless you have a 64-bit processor or an older "Hyper-threading" CPU, you will be better off running Windows 2000 than XP or Vista; your system will be able to work better and will give you less problems.
XP is just a minor revision of 2000. Is the skin that makes you feel bad about XP? It can be completely disabled. I run XP and it's disabled. It lookslike Windows 2000.
It may look like it, but its not. Windows XP comes with integrated DRM; Win2k doesn't. XP has product activation that can kill your system when you make changes to it. whether or not you disable the crap, XP still uses more system resources than win2k. and there is that whole networking & thread limiting thing. But i actually don't have anything against
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Funny, Gartner put Mac Market Share at 8.1% for Q3 2007 for sales. 6.3% overall marketshare if you believe IDC. http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/10/18/reports-apples-us-market-share-now-81-or-is-it-63/