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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."
I work for the University of Washington. This past summer, we ordered around 200 new Dells, that came preloaded with Vista (we had no choice in the matter). As soon as we got them, we used our site license to replace Vista with XP on all of our computers. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens in other corporate environments.
I'm not going to install it myself unless I have to, but I fully accept that almost everyone else is going to have Vista in the next few months. Such is the current way things work.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How come Vista is less popular during the first year compared to the first year of XP? It sold 10% more if I read it right.
Or maybe they're still counting those pc that came with Vista Basic / Vista Starter editions that was willingly replaced with another Vista edition (x2 Vista sales) or a XP or a Linux...
What they should count is not the number of sales but the number of Vista machines pinging their update servers. (Well since most are connected now anyway, that could at least be an alternative way to count)
There's no doubting that the wintel duopoly is a cycle that's nearly impossible to break. As we see more and more services transition to the web, however, compatibility at the OS layer becomes less and less important. Five years ago one used to lament over how they would love to use a different OS, but "the applications I use" are Windows-only. That day has come and gone... these days many people don't even know that a computer can be used for things other than browsing the web -- heck even that term is out-dated, as today's web-based applications are far more sophisticated than simply browsing.
As a very biased Mac convert, I'm constantly amazed at just how incredibly crappy XP and Vista are. Tonight, in fact, I set up a new computer for my wife who is using XP on a brand-new Dell laptop. There were about 5 times during the setup process where I honestly had no idea which option to select, because the wording of the choices were either esoteric, or what I really wanted was a fourth option "none of the above" yet that option didn't exist. 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've never been more convinced that the market is ripe for a shakeup... and more specifically that OS X (and Leopard) have the chance to break the Windows monopoly. Once MS's marketshare dips into the 70% range, there will no longer be an assumption that you "have" to run Windows for any reason other than you prefer it -- and once that happens watch out. There isn't a sane person who can look at Windows and OS X side-by-side, for a mass-market consumer audience, and actually say that Windows is the better choice.
[Remember I said I was biased... the point here wasn't to chest-thump about the Mac, but to point out that MS's advantage of being the "default choice" might disappear... and if so we might see their marketshare plummet faster than you can imagine]
On the other hand, Vista was under-developed, rushed, and had integral features removed. That last part is more significant than it might first appear. If you remove chunks out of the foundations of a building, you can expect the building to collapse. The same is true in software - if it's designed to be present, then removing that feature will destabilize everything depending on it. Yes, it was late. So what. The contribution Vista is making to Microsoft is negligible in terms of sales and disastrous in terms of PR in the European courts. Investing a year or two more work into the project would have been cheaper, produced a better product and generally given Microsoft a lot of plusses.
There was pressure for Vista being released. Yeah, and a company that can pay billions in daily fines without working up a sweat needs to pay attention to such pressure why? Due to lost market share? Lost to whom? Other OS' may be catching up, but it'll be five to ten years before they can capture significant marketshare. Three or four years more development would have kept Microsoft's lead and secured it with far less risk of legal retribution.
All in all, Vista's release marked very poor marketing decisions, not just very poor technical ones, although it need not have been that way.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We get computers in the shop all the time with XP on them and people wanting them reloaded - machines that surely didnt come from the shop with XP... hell, some of them probably didn't even come with ME.
Not to mention all those Vista machines of late that folks want reloaded with XP or ubuntu.
LOTS of them. They might have shipped Vista at 39 percent, but I bet the number still using it after a month is less than 35%.
I just wondered what will happen to the slashdot MS-icon http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicms.gif now that Billy is gone...will it be replaced by a borgified version of Ballmer?
/me shudders...
That's exactly why Vista was such a cluster (and not the compute or failover kind). Microsoft can't modularize, strategically. They ran into trouble with Internet Explorer way back when, and ended up dispersing its functions across a bunch of unrelated modules so that it was impossible to remove and still have the OS boot.
They've been adding complexity while, at the same time, increasing the incestuous and promiscuous interrelations between their components. OSX & Linux and most other sane operating systems break things, insofar as possible, into unrelated modules with limited and defined interfaces. (See, e.g., here.) That's because humans can't manage a 50+ million line codebase without strict modularization. Microsoft discovered about halfway through Vista development that even their huge resources couldn't overcome exponential growth in complexity, so they had to throw out much of what they'd done and start from scratch with significantly more modest goals.
I've said before that Vista is Microsoft's "PS/2" moment. IBM discovered that they couldn't take back the PC market. They came out with the PS/2 and the Microchannel bus - and fenced it 'round with patents, and wanted to charge big bucks for others to play there. Third-party companies and consumers failed to beat a path to their door, and used alternatives like EISA until the roughly-as-good PCI came out. Microsoft figured they could just dictate where the PC market would go, too... but the alternatives are getting to be (frankly, have gotten) 'good enough' for the majority of purposes.
The hardware market changed out from under them, too... we picked up a $450 Dell desktop last year, because it was (or should have been) enough for my wife to run the MS Office she's hooked on. It came with Vista Home Basic and we could not believe what a pig it was. I dropped it back to XP at her demand and things are much nicer. People don't spend thousands on single computers anymore, and they badly misjudged the hardware requirements of Vista - it takes a $2000 computer to run well, from what I've seen.
Then there's the whole DRM fiasco... it's a 'perfect storm' for MS. They'll ride it out, like IBM did, but in ten years MS will be one option among many, not the colossus astride the PC market.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
37% seems very low considering 95% of all new machines supposedly ship with Vista. This means people are going out of there way to avoid it, which is a drastic change in consumer habits when it comes to just accepting Microsoft stuff. Sure, there will be the hoardes of sheeple who'll just take another one from MS (and probably say, "please sir, may I have another"), but ANY long-term loss in MS OS share is a "good thing" in my book.
These figures are not very surprising. As operating systems mature generally and hardware becomes more capable, you'd expect fewer folks to upgrade and everyone to upgrade their whole PC less often anyway. WinXP represented a much bigger jump away from the Win9x userbase (home users) than Vista does over XP. Vista comes with much less pressure on anyone to upgrade.
If anything, Microsoft allowed their Vista marketing to run away with them and too many people came to believe in the hype and the marketshare projections. Still, after reading a lot of naysaying, I've installed Vista over XP and have been pleasantly surprised. It is better than I was expecting, though the cruft has to be turned down or turned off. It's certainly "good enough" despite shortcomings, imho, which is what counts with Microsoft. So I imagine Vista will continue to make solid progress in the home and on pre-installs. The enterprise is something else. Besides, if it's known that a Windows 7 will appear in, say, 2009 or 2010, many outfits would elect to skip Vista as a matter of course, whatever it brought to the table.
Reinstalling my Microsoft OS has also reminded me how much good open-source software is now available on this platform. It's often said that a resurgent Apple is putting pressure on the market share of desktop Linux. I wonder whether Vista or in future Windows 7 plus a nice suite of the Open Office, Gimp and Firefox kind won't put on similar pressure from a different direction.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
If many companies are like the one where I work, then the "sales" of Vista are exaggerated. My boss's mentality (which, I admit, has some merit) is: purchase whatever the current license is and then use the same version we've been using, since the license allows that. Then we can upgrade later on when they fix their software.
Right now, we do not use Vista (except for a couple of machines set up by a die-hard Microsoftie) and we have no plans to do so, in the near or distant future.
-M