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."

Comments

XP Sales?

[reaktor]

What about sales of Windows XP?

Re:XP Sales?

[hackstraw]

What about sales of Windows XP?

I don't understand the play by play of each sale of Vista. The above is a fairly relevant question. Along with the summary "they brag about how much money they made last quarter". That is the bottom line. Most computers come with Microsoft software, even if the user does not intend to use the software. At work, most of the desktop and laptops PCs come with windows preinstalled (~90+%), and we either put Linux on them or a site licensed version of Windows XP.

Where I work, like 70 or more percent of the users prefer Linux as the OS. So, today in 2007, regardless of whether we use Windows or Linux, Microsoft gets a cut. How does Vista even come into the picture?

Another thing is that desktop OSes have stagnated. AFAIK, there is nothing significantly different between Windows 2000 and Vista (I'm not a Windows person, so give me some leeway here). That is 7 years of supposed progress. Sure there may be driver updates, and I believe that directX for games is limited on 2k, but the core features are about the same.

My point is that MS has to keep doing _something_ to stay somewhat current, but when it comes down to it, they have established themselves almost like the government in that they simply get a cut of everything anyone does. So Vista might be like Bob or ME. They are still in business.

Re:XP Sales?

[LurkerXXX]

Actually there are significant differences between 2000 and Vista. There are many nice new features in XP.

The problem is for myself and many many others, the downsides of Vista (hardware requirements, bugs in a zero revision OS, etc, etc) outweigh the benefits.

As time goes on and new patches/service packs come out, and people move to new faster hardware, those downsides will become somewhat less, and more people will likely switch to Vista that currently wouldn't consider it.

Re:XP Sales?

[realdodgeman]

You should reclaim money for every single licence you don't use.
1. To save money
2. Not to fund MS.

Re:XP Sales?

[karnal]

The "afford" Vista would be the true reason I won't run it.

In addition, the only benefit I have as a person who runs windows (for games primarily) is DX10; even that at most is not all that compelling. Plus - for "ultimate edition" the price still seems over-the-top for my own needs.

On the laptop I'm typing this on - I dual boot ubuntu (90%) and Windows XP pro (10%) - there are only a few small apps that I truly need windows for. Emulators come to mind - since the Linux side of emulation seems less polished than I would like. If I could, I'd run Ubuntu on my gaming machine - however, my investment in Windows gaming necessitates Windows. And Vista just doesn't appear to add anything that I'd need. I'd be more than open to hear the benefits of Vista and decide on that, but it seems that most geeks that I run into (the group I would be considered in) don't see a good enough value in Vista either.

So, in short, it's not worth the $$.

Re:XP Sales?

[TheNetAvenger]

I'd be more than open to hear the benefits of Vista and decide on that, but it seems that most geeks that I run into (the group I would be considered in) don't see a good enough value in Vista either.


Sadly this is all too true, and not because Vista lacks features, but they are so poorly marketed by MS even 'tech' people don't realize what features are in Vista.

Pick your biggest Windows Fan Tech site and read a review of Vista, they mention less than 10% of the features of Vista, or why the new architecture of Vista does benefit users even if the workings are transparent to the user.

Someone should start an indepth site for tracking this information like Mark Russ. use to do before he went to MS. He still puts out a few good reads on Vista, but other than him, very little is mentioned about the features or inner workings of Vista that showcase some of the technologies it uses that truly are more advanced than most geeks realize.

MS's horrible marketing has really failed on Vista, especially when you see them tout features like Glass and Flip3D as 'wow'. When there are major things like pre-emptive GPU scheduling so you can run multiple 3D games and applications at the same time without a performance penalty that are 'wow' features.

I hope you find a good OS solution for your needs. Take Care...

Re:XP Sales?

[kimvette]

People said the same things about Win2K and XP.

People said no such thing about Win2K. The only real complaint was it required more memory than Win98, but it was considered a tremendous upgrade over Win98/98se, Me, and even NT 4.0. In fact it was such a HUGE improvement to the NT Family of operating systems that NO ONE missed NT 4.0, except perhaps a few paper MCSEs who loved that NT was sometimes a pain in the ass to add hardware to and were in fear of their jobs.

No, Win2K was a HUGE upgrade and no one had any real complaints about it compared to previous Windows versions. Likewise, aside from a few Activation concerns, there were few complaints about the Win2K3 upgrade. XP and Vista on the other hand, offered little in exchange for eye candy and DRM.

Re:XP Sales?

[paganizer]

Sorry, got to rant.
I do animations semi-professionally. I work with a lot of media clips, do a lot of encoding.
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.
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.
I've got a pretty nice laptop, a HP DV8230US, running, as I mentioned, XP media center. It's got a decent PVR capability, and is "Vista Ready". I tried Vista on it. My nice snappy laptop started acting like the P120 laptop I gave my 4 year old to play with.
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.
If you have a 64-bit CPU, an older hyper-threading processor, or want to save a little effort, WinXP will do everything that actually matters better than Vista on similar hardware. Everything. no exceptions.
I just can not fathom why anyone would accept a computer with Vista if they had a choice; how is Aero going to help you do anything? neither XP nor vista out of the box is more secure than Win2ksp4 running a free copy of Tiny Personal Firewall & Spybot, and every other new "feature" that it has either hurts your performance or cripples fair use.
I'm really serious on this question. All the Vista defenders I'm seeing in this thread, are you running it by choice? what is it doing for you that Win2k or XP or Debian couldn't do better?

Re:XP Sales?

[Thangodin]

I've heard that the problem with Vista is not one that can be patched; the kernal has built in DRM, and the DRM is performing background checks every time you stream or play anything (even while you play games.) In other words, the flaw is by design, and will never be fixed. This would certainly explain the problem where playing music drops network bandwidth to ten or twenty percent. Apparently, if you buy Vista, you get to be screwed by the RIAA at clock cycle regularity.

Can anyone confirm this?

I'm looking to buy a new computer, but at the moment Vista is a deal breaker. I'd even be willing to buy a legit copy of XP for it, but the copy protection is too onerous--I can change my hardware configuration on a desktop machine five times in five minutes, and I'll be damned if I'm going to call Microsoft at 2:00 AM to ask permission to use MY computer. (It's not a problem on my laptop.)

By the way, I'm a little suspicious of some of the pro-Microsoft apologists here, especially after reading posts on discussions about the XBox 360 vs. PS3, which bear no relation from what I'm hearing from owners of those consoles (in some cases with the 360, former owners.) I suspect we have a few people from Microsoft's marketing department lurking here, so take at least some of the glowing reviews of Vista here with a grain of salt.

Re:XP Sales?

[DaleGlass]

Actually it's a funny thing, but these days I use Linux not so much because of what it does, but because of what it doesn't.

For me, an OS is a base system that's just there to run my applications. It's supposed to do its thing, be unobtrusive, and then get the hell out of my way.

Linux:
* My current install doesn't have performance degrading pointless effects.
* It doesn't have activation, or require entering serial numbers
* It doesn't have DRM
* It doesn't popup message boxes when it wants to get updated.
* It doesn't try to REBOOT without my consent. Seriously, WTF is up with that?
* It doesn't require an antivirus which slows down performance, and constantly pops up message boxes announcing gleefully how it now can detect 3 viruses more.
* Installing programs doesn't require clicking through legalese, and refusing offers to register. They install, no questions asked.
* Software doesn't ship with spyware, and doesn't nag to be updated/registered
* 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.

Trying to sell me Vista because it has features is a pointless endeavor. Here's what I want: Win2K with kernel improvements, DX10 and all that. No DRM, no Aero, no activation, no interface changes. Until MS makes that, I'm not buying.

Re:XP Sales?

[callmetheraven]

I think you had it right the first time.

Re:XP Sales?

[Prien715]

* Installing programs doesn't require clicking through legalese, and refusing offers to register. They install, no questions asked.

I'm sorry but I had to laugh out loud when I read that. I don't think anyone actually reads the legalese to install a program. Further, whenever I try to install someone non-trivial on Linux, I wish I got questions. Instead, I get standard error output! I usually spend an hour or so trying to resolve some dependency error, or debug on obtuse error when trying to use some very well-intentioned but buggy (in my experience) utility for automating it (e.g. apt-get).

I use Linux as my primary OS at work and I have been using it for years, but I spend much more time at work tweaking my machine than I do at home. And further, I don't know any non-zealot who believes the whole "Linux is easier to maintain and use on the desktop" nonsense. Hell, even Linus doesn't. RMS might, but he hasn't used a non-GNU OS since System V;)

I hate feeding the trolls but:

No DRM, no activation
There's some nice folks at the the pirate bay that can help you with that....

no Aero, no interface changes.
You can turn it off. Before you bitch about it being the default, let me ask you if you just choose all the defaults for your Linux install?

Re:XP Sales?

[node 3]

Leopard demands more in hardware than Vista Leopard and Vista take different approaches to minimum system requirements. Vista will run on extremely old hardware, it will just do so very, very slowly. As you get faster, more and more features are enabled. Leopard just won't install on Macs beyond a certain point.

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?

Re:XP Sales?

[Kjella]

* 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.

Also worth noting

[thanksforthecrabs]

Ubuntu sales remained flat...

Not very surprising

[norbac]

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.

Re:Still outsold all Linuxes combined

[Pedrito]

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.

The lack of "buzz" is noteworthy

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:The lack of "buzz" is noteworthy

[moosesocks]

I would peg this on a few different things:

1) Vista was late. Really late. Many of the 'killer' features were torn out, leaving an OS that had very little new to offer. Apple's list of improvements between OS versions is very specific and tangible, addressing individual concerns. Time Machine sticks out as being a good example of this.
2) Unlike Windows XP, which was a significant upgrade, and replaced an OS (98/Me!) that many consumers were unhappy with, people are generally still happy with XP. For the most part, all of the complaints people had with 98/Me were solved by XP.
3) It was marketed poorly, and as I've already mentioned, it didn't have all that many tangible selling points. They could have put a huge emphasis on its supposedly improved resistance to viruses and spyware, but this would be admitting that XP was deeply and fundamentally flawed, which probably wouldn't sit too well with consumers either. This was a lot more noticeable against the backdrop of Apple's marketing campaigns. Apple's had arguably the most successful marketing campaign of any company in any industry over the past few years.
4) Many consumers felt abandoned by Microsoft, after they stopped improving IE, and did virtually nothing to stop the pandemic proliferation of viruses and spyware until it was far too late. The fact that they strongly urge customers to purchase a 3rd-party AntiVirus reeks of incompetence, even to ordinary consumers.

Come to think of it, Vista is probably the best thing that's ever happened to Apple.

Re:Isn't this typically the slowest quarter?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:What about XP sales?

[thrash242]

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.

Nice troll

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

The only reason Vista is selling

[QuietLagoon]

is the home market, where there is little choice. If you buy a PC, you pretty much get Vista installed.

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.

Re:What about XP sales?

[Rascale]

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.

Re:Still outsold all Linuxes combined

[LingNoi]

All this political in-fighting between the XP and Vista communities just proves that Windows is not ready for desktop.

You got to be kidding me..

[LingNoi]

Journal written by twitter (104583)

Twitter the troll made slashdot main page? WTF?!

and posted by kdawson

Oh right, nm.

Re:Why downgrade on a new high end pc?

[Donniedarkness]

There are reasons to not use Vista beyond speed.

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.

Re:No Joke. Re:You got to be kidding me..

[Spacezilla]

http://slashdot.org/~twitter/

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. :)

Re:Isn`t it strange?

[BasharTeg]

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.