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

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.

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: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.

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.

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.