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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."
What about sales of Windows XP?
Ubuntu sales remained flat...
Vista is no longer "new", so obviously there is less demand. Those who want it already own it, those who don't aren't going to buy it, but it's still being shipped on millions of new PC's. This goes for pretty much any product, sales are strong at the beginning then gradually fade. I would expect Vista sales to continue dropping, with another spike after SP1 is released and more people feel like trying it out.
Apart from not being new, this also says nothing about the relative merits of Vista as an OS. In fact, if Vista sales had continued to increase right when people are saving up for the holidays, that would be extremely impressive, and quite unexpected.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Why is it not surprising that this is how the quarterly earnings report makes it onto Slashdot? The title could have read "Microsoft Reports 27% Revenue Growth; Fastest First Quarter Since 1999", or that Microsoft stock has reached its highest point it over 5 years. It might be notable that the Entertainment division was this quarter profitable, or that income in the client division still grew 25% (claims of slowing Vista sales notwithstanding).
As much as folks here love to think that MSFT is a sinking ship, it's having its healthiest growth in years.
I would be willing to bet that over the counter sales of Vista, that is, upgrades and personal new system builders, exceeded that for those of any Linux by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps true, but as someone who writes software for Windows for a living, I managed for about 2 days with Vista before I was overcome by the overwhelming urge to replace it with XP. It is, by far, the suckiest POS OS I've ever uses and I will do everything I can to avoid ever having to use it. Most people I know have had a similar Vista experience. I don't know a single person who has said, "Wow, Vista has really made my computer so much better." On the other hand, a lot of people who upgrade from Windows 98 to XP did say that about XP.
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.
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Something really does feel different from previous Windows OS introductions.
My nontechnical friends and acquaintance do make light conversation about things they've heard of in the news, and will ask me, as a "computer genius," what I'm using at work. Previous Windows upgrades got mentioned in casual talk. Usually there are a least a few people who want to be the first kid on the block with it.
Not this time.
People talk about the iPhone, they talk about their newly-installed Verizon FiOS, their iPods, what brands of Wintel computers I trust, whether they can run Windows on the Intel Macs.
I don't detect any consumer excitement about Vista. Nobody has asked me if they should upgrade. And a couple of people have asked me whether I agree with friends of their who told them to avoid it.
Unscientific sample? You bet.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
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Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Microsoft in any way and prefer Linux as an OS. My below post is being unbiased and discussing Vista purely as a mainstream, consumer OS.
Ahem.
Except it's not crappy. It's a perfectly fine Windows OS. It's better than XP in every way I can think of.
The problem, I think, is that it doesn't really have anything to get people who are content with XP to upgrade. That combined with all the FUD about Vista makes for poor sales. I got it because I built a new machine, mainly for gaming. My old machine still had Win2000 on it as I wasn't a fan of XP. Now it has Slackware.
What happens to linux during an economic downturn, what you mean like the one we had when the bubble burst? People all of sudden realized that no, you do NOT require expensive systems to run servers, you can do it with a whiteboxes running linux. You pick up sun gear for a song as all the dotcoms who had splurged on unneeded equipment went bust, while the likes of google (linux) continued on, because they kept their costs under control.
Your troll sounds reasonable, until you remember linux has been around long enough to have seen what you predict, and came out stronger then ever.
As for MS making lots more money, that is true enough (it is also spending a lot more) but if what you say then MS shouldn't feel at all threatned, so why is it acting like it is? You are sayinga mighty lion is not going to be scared by a little dog, while behind you that lion is trying to climb a tree to get away from it.
Most opensource developers already got good jobs, they do this on the side, because they want too. You are predicting that people will stop their hobby when the economy goes bad? A hobby that doesn't really cost anything except time? You got a weird view of human nature.
I got a next troll for you, linux will die when the developers discover girls.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The business market has a little more choice available (XP is still being sold to businesses), and Windows XP is still the big seller.
So what does this tell us? When there is a choice, XP is purchased instead of Vista. Microsoft tis so desperate to make it appear as if Vista is selling, that they are counting the Vista->XP "downgrade" as a Vista license in use.
We run XP Pro Corporate edition at work, which allows distribution via disk imaging. When we needed 50 new XP licenses, our distributor told us XP Pro Corp. is no longer available, but we could buy Vista licenses, and "downgrade" to XP. We have absolutely no intention of running Vista.
I bet a large proportion of the increases in business licenses are companies like ours who need just need more XP licenses.
All this political in-fighting between the XP and Vista communities just proves that Windows is not ready for desktop.
Compatibility, for example. Or maybe most people just don't like the interface? How about the fact that it wants me to reactivate my product every few weeks?
Regardless of how high-end my computer is, I do not want Windows Vista. XP handles my printing. For everything else, there's Ubuntu.
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It's a perfectly fine Windows OS. It's better than XP in every way I can think of.
If that's not damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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:)
Eek, modded down so many times! And you almost have a 5 digit user id, so you must have been doing this for a very long time! Well, you're certainly persistent! Have you considered a career in Jehovah's Witnesses? They keep coming to my house and I can't seem to get them to give up. I think you and they may have a lot in common, with the obvious exception that you're slightly more fanatic about your beliefs.
Artifical-Market-Segmentation
;^)
Interestingly, "Microsoft Vista" is an anagram of "Cost Favoritism", and "Microsoft Windows Vista" is an anagram of "It Wows Avid Conformists." I believe that these are original.
I think the latter needs an animated GIF, and is a great comeback to the "well everyone else is upgrading so you should too" nonsense.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
This is pure spin. Look at how this article takes Microsoft's huge jump in profits and manages to turn it into somehow Microsoft is failing and covering up their failure. Of course sales of Vista fell compared to the first few months it was being sold! Everyone who was going to be an early adopter of Vista bought it within that time frame. Now sales are going to be more linked to the OEM channel, and independant sales are going to slow as cautious users wait for SP1.
Seriously, articles like this are pure FUD, trying to take a moment of Microsoft's success and some how make it about their failure. If the OSS community wants to support article writers like the jackass who wrote this one, you're just going to hoodwink yourselves into thinking you're destroying Microsoft when in fact, they're posting record profits and sales of Vista are moving along quite nicely.
Here's a little dose of reality:
Source
And while the Cupertino-based company crossed its fingers and hoped that the trade-off was the right strategy, statistics released by Market Share by Net Applications paint an entirely different picture. Market Share by Net Applications data reveals that MacIntel has lost market share and is down to 2.48% in June compared with 2.51% in May. Mac OS has also dropped to 3.52% from 3.95% two months ago.
The open source Linux operating system is stagnating. The various distributions of Linux are credited with only 0.71% of the operating system market in June 2007, up from 0.70% in May. One other platform that has been continuously experiencing the erosion of its market share is Windows XP. With Windows Vista available for five months already, XP users are increasingly upgrading their operating systems. Vista has a good momentum in the detriment of XP, which dropped from 82.02% in May to 81.94% in June. By comparison, Vista continues to increase its installed base and has jumped from 3.74% in May to 4.52% of the operating system market in June.
The reality of the situation is, Vista surpassed Mac OS X and Linux in desktop usage without breaking a sweat. The reality of the situation is, XP users are upgrading to Vista. The reality of the situation is, IE6 users are upgrading to IE7, either through Vista upgrades or Windows Update. If you don't like any of these realities, and you want to do something to advance the cause, please do. But don't let idiotic propaganda articles trick you into thinking the battle is already being won, because it isn't.
The only credit I can give to the author of this sad excuse for journalism is that I simply couldn't imagine it was possible to spin a leap in revenue and profit, in the billions of dollars, for a single quarter, into somehow saying Microsoft is suffering. Making a big fuss about "slowing" sales of Vista, when any operating system sold, including OSX has the exact same sales characteristic. After the initial rush of sales during the first few months of product release, sales of OSX slowed! OH NOES! And pointing out that Microsoft's advertising unit posted a loss due to an acquisition... duh.
This article is crap, and it's sad that it got posted on slashdot because it only feeds the flow of misinformation to the OSS community. I remember how upset we all used to get about Microsoft FUD articles, yet it seems some of those pretending to support OSS have figured out that they can write pro-OSS or anti-Microsoft FUD articles and most people will lap it up because that's what they want to hear.