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?

[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?

[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?

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.

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.

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.

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: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.