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Vista Shipped On 39% of PCs In 2007

Posted by kdawson on from the another-massive-success-could-sink-the-company dept.

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."

4 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How many are actually running XP? by kemushi88 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech. by jd · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Nobody, but nobody, buys version 1 of a product - if they've any sense. It's bad enough to buy a whole-number release (those are likely to be the buggiest) but version 1 is a huge no-no. In the case of Microsoft, the first service pack has acquired a reputation for not being good either. Virtually all Windows SP1 releases have been followed rapidly by hotfixes and even other service packs. This isn't unique to Windows - the majority of brown paper bag releases of the Linux kernel that seriously impact users are also x.y.0 releases. It's a fundamental principle of software purchase that has always been true and will likely always be true.

    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)
    1. Re:Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech. by gweihir · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Vista was very long in development for very little to show. Software complexity grows exonentially with the size. You can do a lot by proper moularization and resuse.

      However my impression is, that MS basically has a failed project in Vista and that they would actually have had to scrap it 3-4 years into development, learn the lesson that they are subjects to laws of nature (or mathematic) as well and start over. They obviouly were not smart or gutsy enough for that.

      On the other hand, it is possible that MS is not large enough to develop a new operating system with the fature profile they wanted Vista to have. It may in fact be impossible today to write an integrated OS with these features, because of complexity. Look at the rest of the world: Apple did not build a new OS with OSX, they basically took a working kernel and tools and customized them to some degree at the interface level. Linux is a reimplementation of Unix that keeps the original structure and API to a high degree. Any other (non-embedded) OSes in the last years/decade that were actually written from scratch and not based strongly on a previous design? I don't know any.

      But there is one other thing. As OSX and Linux demonstrate, writing it from scratch is entirely unecessary. The technology is there and works. Use it. Possibly MS cannot see this or their market strategy does not allow it. After all they have to tie their cistomers to them. Who would otherwise suffer such abuse? If so, they may very well be screwed.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  3. OT: what will happen to the MS-icon? by Loibisch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...