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

Explaining Vista's flop?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Smart Microsoft employees design smart features.
2. Smart Microsoft employees flock to Google.
3. Dumb Microsoft employees can't implement the designed features.
4. ?
5. Profit.

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?

[aliatgb]

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.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[kemushi88]

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.

Re:How many are actually running XP?

[forkazoo]

Uhhh... I would assume that all the systems were imaged using Ghost or something similar. They would have been anyway with Vista in order to avoid manually setting them up for deployment, so no additional time was spent versus deploying with Vista, and the site license would mean that no dollars were spent versus Vista. So, that hardly seems like an act of pigheaded ignorance. I would have done exactly the same thing, under the circumstances.

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?

[ozmanjusri]

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.

I know it's nice to feel all elite, but that simply isn't true.

Plenty of my friends don't use computers as part of their employment (concrete workers, fitters etc) but are quite capable of basic computer tasks like email, web, games etc. They are also quite capable of recognising that the Vista interface is more confusing, inconsistent and sluggish that the one which preceded it, and are asking tech-minded friends to help them get rid of it. I'd say at least half of the people I know who've bought a machine with Vista installed have asked for the computer to be upgraded to XP or Linux within a month.

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.

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!

Breaking the cycle

[pez]

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]

I bet 100% of all PC's will come with Vista

[boldit]

Since Microsoft is now forcing sellers to only sell Vista, Vista will be 100% in 2008.

Re:Didn't get it

[digitalbountyhunter]

That would require many abaci.

Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech.

[jd]

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.

Re:Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech.

[gweihir]

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.

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.

Of course its not selling...

[Agent__Smith]

It takes a CRAY to run it, and it is buggier than an entomology lab.

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.

What?

[poptones]

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%.

Re:I'm running Vista Home Premium ...so what?

[kypper]

It has it's upside, it has its' downside.

The grammar check on it sucks.

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.

the missing links

[someone1234]

4. Chairs spotted on Earth orbit.

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%.

Slashdot doesn't like Vista

[heffrey]

I'm picking up a little vibe here that Slashdot editors and readers don't like Vista.

Has anyone else noticed or am I just imagining it....

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

[Technician]

For some reason, a lot of PC manufacturers don't give the consumer an option for a pre-loaded OS.

This is true. In the past (DOS days) people would ask me regarding computer purchase selections. What I said then is just as true today. Find out what programs you need to run and then find the hardware which is capabile of running it.

Many people wanting to do multimedia, photography, video production, etc are needing something with realtime hardware support. Those people are moving to hardware and OS that support the required applications. Vista is not a real time OS and is unsuitable for many capture devices. Alternatives to fill the gap often include Apple and some Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Studio.

Nothing kills a live session more than a request for an Adobe PDF viewer update request in the middle of a session. I got this one during a live presentation while playing a DVD. The DVD on the projector simply stopped. Going to the laptop, we discovered that despite the fact were in the field with no internet connection, Adobe needed our permission to get an update. The fact a PDF viewer has permission to stop the show by having Windows Vista stop it to ask permission for an update without a net connection convinced me that Vista is unsuitable for presentation and digital audio workstation applications.

My Digital Audio Workstation is now Ubuntu Studio based with low latency and no interruptions of a live recording session. Some people prefer an Apple soulution.

Audacity is OSS and cross platform. It works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Many capture devices have serious latency and breakup problems in Vista. Audacity works in Vista, but capturing sound should be done on another platform.

Many popular USB capture devices simply are not supported on Vista because of the non-real time nature of the OS. Here are a few popular interfaces without Vista support;
Roland http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?ObjectId=743&ParentId=114
http://www.roland.com/products/en/UA-101/specs.html
Beringer http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pdf/man/m_702540.pdf

I found some of the Yamaha mixers with built-in USB interfaces list Vista, but the manual was quick to point out problems are caused if it has too little memory, has a slower processor, or several other items that can cause problems with multi-track recordings.

For real-time capture, I prefer to use a hardware priority OS. I have used this instead of Vista for Digital Music Studio work.
http://ubuntustudio.org/

OT: what will happen to the MS-icon?

[Loibisch]

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...

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.

Microsoft refuses to modularize.

[Dr. Manhattan]

You can do a lot by proper moularization and resuse... 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.

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.

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: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.