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Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling 'incredibly well,' he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. 'Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,' the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on '45 percent of all of new business PCs.' Which is enlightening, since business users are about the only buyers of new PCs that get a choice." Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?
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His figures may be correct. Slow sales are the only way to explain M$'s drop in proffit when it's so hard to buy anything but an expensive version of Vista so you can "downgrade" to XP like a lot of people do. Just a while back, he was crowing about how people were buying nothing but the expensive versions of Vista.
The hardware has become a lot cheaper for vendors to be making money. You can make money selling laptops for $700 when they cost you less than $100 to make. Shelves are packed with $350 laptops right now, which implies a cost to the retailer of $175 or massive losses. There should be a lot more sales than there are for that kind of thing to happen.
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Compare also say, OSX. I don't know ANY mac user hankering for OS9, and things like leopard are still eagerly snatched up even with teething troubles, so it's not just new OS shock - I think vista really is a step backwards for most users.
There were a lot of Mac users hankering for MacOS 9 until about 10.2, when OS X started to really mature. There was even a 'return to classic' movement early on (can't recall their name now). The many advantages of OS X compared to MacOS 9 helped get reluctant users on board though.
I see Vista as having more problems in user acceptance than early OS X did, but OS X had a few problems of its own.