Vista Shipped On 39% of PCs In 2007

Stony Stevenson writes "Vista is proving far less popular than XP did with new PC buyers during the earlier OS's first year on the market. This conclusion follows from statements by Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show. Gates boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January. Based on Gates's statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that shipped in 2007. And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only outperformed first-year sales of XP by 10%, according to Gates's numbers, while PC shipments have doubled in the years since XP's release."

Comments

I'm surprised that number isn't higher.

[purpledinoz]

For some reason, a lot of PC manufacturers don't give the consumer an option for a pre-loaded OS. For example, Dell Canada doesn't offer XP for their Inspiron line (although Dell USA does offer XP, for some reason, Canadians get screwed), and almost all Asus laptops come pre-loaded with Vista. I think it's the same BS for consumer line HP laptops too. I ended up buying a business line laptop, which came pre-loaded with Vista, but came with Vista and XP discs.

It seems to me that Microsoft is strong-arming PC manufacturers to offer Vista only, so I'm surprised that number isn't higher.

Re:I'm surprised that number isn't higher.

[ivan256]

Most machines are sold to businesses. They've had the option to get XP instead all along.

Re:I'm surprised that number isn't higher.

[purpledinoz]

Good point. My company is a software development house, which uses everything Microsoft (even Visual SourceSafe!!!). And my company hasn't even considered moving anyone to Vista. Unfortunately, I got downgraded to Office 2007...

How many are actually running XP?

[TheLink]

I believe lots of companies get to use an older version instead of Vista even though they have a Vista license.

Microsoft gets to count it as a Vista sale (and brag), and Big Corp gets to use Win2K/XP.

Same goes for MS Office 2007.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[forkazoo]

You have to wonder how many of the people that did get Vista on their laptop/desktop remove Vista and install XP? I work for a major electronics retailer and we always have people that buy Vista machines and have us install windows xp on them for a fee. Sort of related but we get an ungodly high amount of computer returns with the reason being Vista sucks.

Honestly, I would expect that in the retail channel, the vast majority of PC's sold with Vista are running Vista. In a corporate environment, a lot of IT departments are probably not bothering with Vista while others beta test it, and won't have any interest in investigating deploying it until SP1 is well understood. On the common home user front, however, people use whatever their machine came with. most of them don't know what the difference is between Office and Windows. Hell, some of them have trouble grasping the difference between "MSN Windows" and "AOL Instant Messenger." Yes, really.

Vista may drive some people to insist that their new machine be made to "work like the old one." But the vast majority of the consumer base just isn't well educated enough in the subject to be able to make a choice between XP and Vista. They are still using Windows 98, and just want to replace the old busted one as conveniently as possible.

It seems that all the statistics and reports about how Vista is doing well, or Vista is doing badly seem to ignore the fact that when it comes to consumer sales, the average buyer is simply incapable of being "excited about the new hotness" or of "rejecting the new beast." Whenever you read these sorts of information tidbits, just assume that about a third of all computers are sold to iguanas.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[an.echte.trilingue]

The school will never put vista back on these boxes, I assure you. The first rule of IT support is "once the box is doing what it should be, don't fuck with it." So that concern is moot.

As for why they bought boxes with Vista instead of XP, anything we can come up with is pure speculation and pretty much worthless. However, I would guess that whoever made that decision, knowing that he would just ghost XP onto the boxes with the volume license, just took the cheapest option. Maybe there was a promotion on that particular configuration; who knows.

I would like to point out that nobody buys 200 computers from dell without going through the business division. Even the with the cheapest boxes, you are still looking at a $100,000 of expenditures. That is not huge volume, but it is enough to get draw attention from higher budgetary authorities in any institution, which means whoever is making the purchase has researched his options and is able to justify himself to that authority.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[Anne Thwacks]

The vast majority of PC buyers certainly don't use Windows 98.

Maybe not in the USA, but here in Europe, once you have bought a PC,
you go on using it until it ceases to work, unless you are a hard core
gamer. Since it doesnt need new tyres or exhaust, there is nothing wrong
with the old one. Once it dies, its time to get a new one. Then you ask
a tech-minded family member what to buy - and he, mindfull of the
possibiities of virus-related support calls, says "Get a Mac". Unless
he doesnt know what a Mac is, in which case, he says get something
that does not have Vista on.

Of course, this advise is not understood, and a week later, he has
to install an OEM copy of XP supplied by a local computer fair.

Yes, my wife's cousin knows someone who likes Vista, but she has
a very expensive HP laptop, and does not know how to use Word.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[donaldm]

I recently purchased a laptop that came with Vista Ultimate 64 bit and I put on Fedora 7 and later on Fedora 8 with no dual boot and everything works for me including Wireless. Does Microsoft care that I did this? No they don't since as far as they are concerned they have a Vista sale. I could hand in my license for a refund however I may if I was lucky and jumped through many hoops get US$100 but when I sell my laptop in six months time I would have a hard time doing so since I know the prospective buyer would want MS Vista on it.

Because I only keep a laptop for about a year (I get a very good work discount) I nearly always break even and sometimes make a profit, however I do give the prospective buyer the option of a fully operational Fedora or even Ubuntu Distribution but in all cases they want a Microsoft OS which has nothing on it so I always make sure I can recover that OS so I don't bother getting my money back. If you say to a prospective buyer that they can get a huge amount of legitimate free software with Linux Distributions they still prefer to get a bare MS Windows OS and are quite comfortable with pirating (they always know someone) the MS Windows compatible software even though they would never continence taking an item worth a few cents from a supermarket shelf.

My attitude to this is to actually charge more for the laptop with MS Vista plus the recovery DVD's than if I sold it with a Linux Distribution although I would still give them the recovery DVD's and surprisingly people are happy with this, go figure.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[ozmanjusri]

Yo don't have to work with computer to know how to use them. You do, however, have to be somewhat interested, and most people are not, not even the tiniest bit.

No, these are normal ordinary people who can recognize that their computer has become harder and less pleasant to use. It's not that complicated. You don't need to be a guru to understand that things that used to work don't anymore.

Just one question...

[Zymergy]

If 39% of new PCs initially Shipped with Vista in 2007, what percentage were promptly un-boxed, reformatted, and then a *better* OS was then installed?

(I know of 2 new OEM PCs in my home business that were immediately 'Upgraded' to XP fresh out of their Vista promoting boxes in PY2007.) http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206

Do consumers have a choice?

[multipass666]

No kidding, try get a laptop these days without Vista already installed. The Dell XPS is a good example. Like buying a new car, its a mandatory extra. Want to boot linux? Still have to buy Vista anyway, yay!

There is no potential upsell opportunity

[igb]

potential upsell opportunity

Retail end users don't upgrade operating systems, ever. This may not be 100% true, but it's certainly 95% true. When consumers buy a new PC in order eradicate spyware, what makes you think OS upgrades are on the agenda (even if they actually work with the hardware present, which is a whole other story). Businesses might, but OEM pricing of licensing is so low relative to Select/Enterprise that usually it makes no economic sense. So I believe a seat sold with XP is a seat lost to Vista for 2-4 years.

ian

XP solved problems, Vista creates them.

[Jane Q. Public]

Most computers running Win98SE would also run XP, if maybe a bit slow. Vista requires a major hardware upgrade for most people to run acceptably or at all. For example, I was developing on an XP machine, and it performed acceptably if not exactly snappy. But it won't run Vista... at all. So what do you get for that major hardware upgrade? Better performance? Nope. Vista often runs more sluggishly on the new machines than XP did on the old. Graphics? Well, maybe a little. But OS X and Linux are adding that, too, without all the extra overhead. Freedom? Not on your life! One of the major performance-robbing "features" is that DRM has been "built in" at a very fundamental and low level. So everything you do on the machine, you are being checked every which way to make sure you are not doing something "wrong"! Why would anybody spend that much money for something that hardly benefits them at all, but benefits "the industry" a lot? When you can figure that out, then mayby you can sell Vista to them.

Re:XP solved problems, Vista creates them.

[tknd]

I call BS. Windows 98 was a dog on 16MB of RAM (from where Win95 ran acceptably). Windows 98 ran much better with 32MB of ram. Windows XP however was a dog even at 256MB. But Win2k (which you conveniently gloss over) ran well at that level.

Vista often runs more sluggishly on the new machines than XP did on the old.

This has been true of every Windows OS. Win95 slower than Win3.1. Win98 slower than Win95. Win2k slower than Win98se (why does everyone conveniently forget the whole 98se gaming benchmark enthusiasm?). WinXP slower than Win2k except in boot time (more ram required).

But OS X and Linux are adding that, too, without all the extra overhead.

Windows is fat, I'll give you that. But no OS is not putting on the pounds. Ubuntu documentation about hardware requirements says that the graphical system will suffer if you have less than 192MB of ram. And so I tried it. And yes, that was pretty horrible on a duron 600mhz with 192mb of ram. But I bet Win98se would have screamed.

Why would anybody spend that much money for something that hardly benefits them at all, but benefits "the industry" a lot?

Explain ipods, gps, and other gadgetry. Explain all the stupid CD/DVD software at the retail stores when you can download open source equivalents that actually get the job done right. People are sold on things all the time.

Vista's retail costs are quite steep, but oem is still just as cheap. You can easily get a refurb dell box with ridiculous hardware specs on the low end (dual core, at least 1gb of ram) for around $300.

I don't even understand why I'm responding to you. It is clear you have not used vista with your generalized claims.

Vista and XP

[sqrt(2)]

The thing that no one, here especially, wants to admit is that the problems with Vista are going to start disappearing real soon. Disappearing in the way the problems with XP have disappeared...you're still using Windows after all.

When you buy a new computer with Vista it's going to be so powerful that the bloat that's been added since XP (and this isn't a Microsoft problem, OSX and Ubuntu all have gotten bigger) wont be noticed, or even noticeable. You could make the argument that there's no reason a home user needs a dual core processor and two gigs of RAM but that's what is being sold. If the upcoming service pack does most of what MS claims it can do the differences between XP and Vista will be even further reduced. Hardware and software compatibility is a big problem, but it's one that MS has dealt with before. XP had the same issues. Eventually software got updated or replaced and it isn't a problem. It's the same cycle as last time. Machines get faster and software gets updated. The new MS OS goes through some growing pains but eventually becomes accepted. XP was too slow, no compelling reasons to upgrade, 2000 was good enough and faster. Now the lines are: Vista is too slow, there's no reasons to upgrade, XP is good enough.

If you remember back when XP was released it did suck compared to 2000. 2000 was the mature product. You want a fair comparison you'll need compare Vista now to XP 1 year after release. Or compare XP SP2 to Vista SP2, but since we can't look into the future we'll have to settle for the first option.

Re:Vista hasn't been out for a full year yet

[vux984]

To be honest, I am surprised that Vista has sold as much as it has, considering that the upgrade from Windows 9x to XP was a much bigger step than from XP to Vista.

9x to XP was a bigger step, but XP was a 0.1 upgrade from w2k, which meant that even when XP was "new" it was already a few years old in a lot of key respects. Most drivers for 2k worked with XP and were already mature, for example. The networking stack was essentially 2k, and it fit into w2k networks exactly the same...pro even came with the CALs 2k pro did... etc, etc... so there was a lot less resistance.

It was essentially already a "mature established product" even when it was new.

Re:What about Win Xp...

[joto]

I doubt it. Joe Bloggs is in my opinion one of these people

1. Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys whatever the salesman wants to sell him, assuming the price-range is right.
2. Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys the one with a colour she likes (which suprisingly often is a pretty good strategy ;-)
3. Doesn't know anything. Asks his fourteen year old cousin. Ends up with a monster PC for gaming that is just as outdated in three years as the cheap one the salesman wanted to sell him

I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.

Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.

Nothing for the OSS crowd to cheer about.

[shikra]

39% is plenty. As OSes mature, improvements are gonna be evolutionary at best. To be able to achieve a 39% adoption rate over a relatively stable OS (XP) is pretty good. No, in fact, it's a very good result considering the bad press MS has been getting lately. I for one wouldn't consider 39% to be a failure given the quality of the product.

Extrapolating the figures given in the summary, we can assume XP has a take-up rate of 60~70%ish within the same period of introduction. That's when most computers were still running on crappy 98 mind you -- hence accounting for the greater adoption rate due to the significant upgrade.

So no, saying it is far less popular is a stretch. 19% would be far less, not 39%.

Re:What about Win Xp...

[AndGodSed]

What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget?

Support for these things are getting better by the day. Pretty soon this will be a nonissue. Right now I have all my peripherals working fine with Linux. It's a perception thing mostly...

until ms admits v sucks, progress is impossible

[astrashe]

You can see MS compounding their errors here, by spinning Vista's successes, and not facing honestly up to the things that people don't like about it, and coming up with solutions.

Customers says, "We don't like Vista!" and MS says, "Yes you do!"

If that doesn't prove that they have a monopolist's attitude, nothing does.

Re:Vista hasn't been out for a full year yet

[MojoStan]

The sales figures quoted are not comparable. The XP figure quoted was for 14 months while the Vista sales period was less than 12 months. The launch date of XP was October 25, while Vista was launched January 30 - yet both speeches were made on January 8. That's three months of sales that XP had over Vista. What you say seemed so obvious (those dates are mentioned in the article and its links) that I re-read the article to see if I was missing something. I did: that 255.7 million of total 2007 PC shipments is based on an estimate from March 20. So the "Vista Shipped on 39% of PCs" estimate is calculated by assuming the floor ("more than 100 million copies") of 11¼ months of Vista sales, then dividing that by a nine-month-old estimate of the last 12 months of PC shipments. However, that's not nearly as bad as how he calculated "Windows XP captured about 67% of the new PC market during its first year."

I have to conclude that the article's author, Paul McDougall, must be a moron and/or a troll. McDougall's math:

• Vista shipped on 39% of PCs in 2007: (floor of Bill Gates's "more than 100 million copies" boast for 11¼ months) divided by (nine-month-old estimate of the last 12 months of PC shipments)
• XP shipped on 67% of PCs in 2002: (14 months of XP sales) divided by (12 months of PC shipments)

I think it's obvious that Vista sales percentages are well below initial XP sales percentages, but we don't need dishonest math to exaggerate this point.

Re:What about Win Xp...

[sgarg]

We got HP Compaq Laptops shipped with Windows Vista Basic that was promptly *replaced* with a Corporate copy of Win XP SP2 (which was again replaced with Linux in many cases) :)

If people are using Vista, then it may be possible they are using it under duress. The manufacturer gives you a nice shiny comp and only ships it with vista. I for example, have asked many dealers to give me a quote with the Vista (whatever edition) replaced with XP SP2, but they said they couldn't do it legally. So, between choosing an unlicensed copy of XP (and feeling bad about it) and a legally acquired copy of Vista, most people just take it :(

Forced migration, that is ...

XP sucks due to third party installations - wha?

[Animaether]

"Then, after all was finally said and done, using the thing was an amazingly frustrating experience, with seemingly endless offers/popups, some masquerading as os-level services, some more obvious overtures to purchase 3rd party software"

I'm sorry - but you are, then, saying that XP sucks because of (as far as I can tell) third party stuff?

Windows XP, without any fancy OEM stuff tacked on, doesn't nag you with seemingly endless offers - the only popups you'll get are the to some annoying 'help bubbles', which others find helpful, and you can turn off either way - the rest of your comment seems to entirely point to third party elements.

That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-.
( For the curious - back up QuickTime 6, install Tiger, restore. Old stuff, but gosh - if we can blame third party solutions for XP 'sucking' then we can certainly blame same-party solutions for OS X 'sucking', no? )

Windows, in general, has plenty of attack vectors available to you to point out how crappy it is; there's really no need to drag third party stuff into the discussion.

Re:What about Win Xp...

[blackdew]

Actually i use, and maintain linux servers daily. It's perfect for this job

I do try to use it as a desktop OS once in a while, but give up after a day or two.

Just a couple days ago i bought a "smart" usb thumbdrive, linux would only see it as SCSI-Generic and not as a disk, and obviously i couldn't mount it whatever i did. it worked fine under WinXP, but to get it to work with linux i had to download some stupid tool from the manufacturer that did some lobotomy to it and it stoped being "smart" but did start working under linux :)
Some time ago my brand new computer with a mainstream motherboard (gigabyte) based on a mainstream chipset (intel) was complitely impossible to install linux on as the kernel would either see the IDE CD OR the SATA HD, depending on bios settings but never both at once. It took about 4 months and a couple kernel versions until it was fixed.
On the very same computer it is STILL impossible to get 5.1 audio without manually doing arcane tweaking to ALSA configs

Now notice that i'm not talking about some more obscure devices like GPSes, phones, webcameras, tuner cards - i'm talking about hardware that milions of other users have besides me, and it still doesn't work right, atleast without tweaking.

The upcoming "year of the linux desktop!11oneoneone" just scares me.

Joe Bloggs will buy XP...

[Crazy Taco]

I doubt it. Joe Bloggs is in my opinion one of these people Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys whatever the salesman wants to sell him, assuming the price-range is right. Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys the one with a colour she likes (which suprisingly often is a pretty good strategy ;-) Doesn't know anything. Asks his fourteen year old cousin. Ends up with a monster PC for gaming that is just as outdated in three years as the cheap one the salesman wanted to sell him I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.

Actually, I think Joe Bloggs will attempt to buy XP given the choice. I state this because I have run into no end of clueless end users with no Vista experience who have told me, "Man, Vista sucks! You shouldn't get that on your new PC." I ask them if they've ever used it. "Well, no..." Can you tell me why it's bad? "Well, not exactly..." Have you ever even seen more than a screenshot of Vista? "Well, no..." Do you know anything at all about computers, and do you have any experience more than just basic usage? At this point they usually attempt to give some answer to justify themselves, but it's always really "No." And then you ask them why, having no experience and having not used the OS, they think Vista sucks, and they always site some relative or random thirdhand source like their brothers friend who told them it sucked. From what I have seen, I believe that most of the anti-Vista sentiment today is actually being generated by ignorant users posting 3rd hand rumors on sites and passing stories around from person to person. Whether or not Vista is terrible is an argument for another day, but I think low sales and persistent complaining have more to do with ignorant rumor mongering in the masses than actual product flaws.

Re:Joe Bloggs will buy XP...

[AvitarX]

I think it has more to do with someone in the family or friends or removed by a degree or 2 buying a Vista certified computer without enough RAM.

Even those forum posts probably relate to that. Vista needs more RAM than the low end systems it is sold on. Especially Laptops. Just like XP was sold with 256MB and had problems, 98 with 16MB(32?) and 95 with 8MB. The new Widows was being sold on last gen hardware and everyone lost (well not the stores that get to sell high-markup RAM).

XP needs 1GB to run background (non-spyware) crap + Office, and Vista needs more. Systems are not being sold with enough and people are complaining. Since all their specs went up and it is slower they see Vista as the problem.

Re:Joe Bloggs will buy XP...

[Keeper Of Keys]

From what I have seen, I believe that most of the anti-Vista sentiment today is actually being generated by ignorant users posting 3rd hand rumors on sites and passing stories around from person to person. Those sound like users who are just sufficiently informed for their needs. After 4 months trying to get on with Vista, I have gone back to XP, and advise everyone I know to avoid Vista. I don't normally go into detail why - non-techies can switch off pretty quickly - but if they asked I'd say it was slow, used a lot of memory and had some unpleasant bugs.

Re:What about Win Xp...

[Gr8Apes]

Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.

It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.

As for your comment about corporate buyers and PC enthusiasts, you underestimate their effect. Corporate is where the bulk of MS's revenue comes from. And PC enthusiasts affect much more than their own purchases, as they're generally the "support tech" for their entire extended family and thus will be the ones asked whether someone should buy this "new fangled Vista computer". (The answer will be "no")

Re:What about Win Xp...

[Zeinfeld]

Last week I needed to install a codec, the gnome media player (I forgot its name, can you imagine) sent me to the correct opensuse webpage concerning the missing codec, I there went to the 'community' solution and clicked an automatic yast install link. This opened yast and I had just to press some buttons. But then, a dependency conflict! Well, actually, it didn't tell me what the conflict was, I just got a pop-up with the possibilities: "find an optimal solution for everything" (this normally gets in an endless loop), "install packet a.23.3.0b (this may affect your system)", "ignore for this instance", "don't install packet a.23.3.0b".

Thing that getsme about these debates is the fact that all computer systems give this type of trouble, yes even Macs. The only real difference between the O/S is how fast people forget about the difficulty.

Systems fail for many reasons, chief amongst them is buggy drivers. But they also fail because the information you need to solve your problem is either not available or difficult to find.

For example, many system lockups occur because of a resource conflict. I have never used any O/S that provided an easy to interpret tool that tells the user why a program is blocked. In windows the cause is frequently some programmer who just does not understand the locking scheme. But the same problem certainly used to occur on UNIX, plenty of programs used to write out lock files that they failled to correctly clean up.

This problem is worst on the Mac, when the Mac works it is great. When it does not you are totally hosed as the programmers make sure you have no tools at all to find out the cause.

And when you have network issues, well you are really on your own. Your problem might be the cable modem is out, or the wireless router, or maybe the broadband provider is down. But you are on your own when it comes to fix it. That is acceptable if you are a techie, but thats not acceptable for the typical user.

That said, the article headline is based on an idiotic calculation. Gates did not give the percentage, nor did he give a hard number for the number of copies of Vista that shipped. He simply said that it was over 100 million. So if the headline was truthfull it would state Vista shipped on at least 39% of computers shipped, or to be more accurate still, Vista shipped on 69% of machines sold +/- 30%. Gates was clearly not giving a precise figure and to use it in this way is more than dishonest, it is deliberately deceptive. I really wish Slashdot could avoid these partisan snipes using statistics about as reliable as those used by politicians.

Re:XP sucks due to third party installations - wha

[ToasterMonkey]

Can you buy a new Windows PC without the crappy 3rd party software he talks about? He's suggesting that there's a big enough difference in quality that switching is easier than ever. What would by far, the majority of people be switching from? Exactly, crap laden PCs. If you're the type that buys a new PC and does a fresh Windows install right away, then you'll probably tolerate it longer, but you're a minority. You also wouldn't be the type buying Windows "by default".

That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-. Compare any off the shelf Mac with any off the shelf Windows PC. Again, blame who you want, I don't care, it doesn't change the experience that the bulk of PC users have.
Nobody said Apple software was perfect, just generally much better in terms of UI. Yes, grayed out Quicktime options are bad. I wouldn't mind seeing the Quicktime UI disappear, and have video playback rolled into Preview, using Quicktime as a back-end. They really need to differentiate QuickTime Pro from the simple video player most people want.

if we can blame third party solutions for XP 'sucking' then we can certainly blame same-party solutions for OS X 'sucking', no? ) Who said you couldn't? You forgot iLife '08 nags as well. Still don't change much in a side-by-side comparison.

Windows, in general, has plenty of attack vectors available to you to point out how crappy it is; there's really no need to drag third party stuff into the discussion. Why not? If you can't by a Windows PC off the shelf without it, isn't it fairly relevant? Macs do fine without half a dozen different 3rd party bolt on software components running at startup to offer you redundant methods of changing the volume, changing your display, wireless settings, mouse settings, etc, all with minor device/vendor specific settings.
Have you ever wondered why more of that garbage isn't centralized someplace, like, I don't know.. the Control Panel?? How did Apple manage to put "System Preferences" on every single user's dock by default?
Could it be that the Control Panel is too confusing, or hard to find? Microsoft can fix a LOT of problems caused by 3rd party software by fixing their own UI, or at least designing it with 3rd party developer's needs in mind. Microsoft is at fault for more than you realize. Again, Apple isn't perfect either. A average Mac user might think the Gimp is just terrible, but some fault might lie with Apple's X11 implementation.
They can't fix everything. Both Apple and MS have 3rd party software that suck in ways neither can effect.

I get your point, but there's little sense in comparing a new, out-the-box Mac with a Windows machine you had to wipe and reinstall. Whether it's Microsoft's fault or not, the OP is more or less correct. Compare an average PC to nearly ANY Mac, (let's keep the discussion to SW for now) and the PC gets spanked. Needless to say, there are a LOT of "average" PCs out there, and a good measure of them bought a Windows machine "by default". A 70/30 split with windows/mac would be enough to see quite a few more Macs at retail, with less pressure to pick Windows "because that's what everyone else uses."