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NPD Group Analysts Say Windows 8 Sales Sluggish
Nerval's Lobster writes "While Microsoft claims it's sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since launch—a more rapid pace than Windows 7—new data from research firm The NPD Group suggests that isn't helping sales of actual Windows devices, which, in its estimation, are down 21 percent from last year. Desktops dropped 9 percent year-over-year, while notebooks fell 24 percent. 'After just four weeks on the market, it's still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market,' Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at The NPD Group, wrote in a Nov. 29 statement attached to the data. 'We still have the whole holiday selling season ahead of us, but clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for.'" That seems to match the public grumbling of Acer and Asus about early sales. And though these figures exclude Surface sales, the newly announced prices on for new Windows 8 Pro-equipped Surface tablets might not endear them to anyone. Have you (or has your business?) moved to Windows 8?
Actually, all this report says is that US desktop and laptop sales are sluggish and that Windows 8 has done nothing to change that. In fact, the actual report, not linked to for some reason, states this: “After just four weeks on the market, it’s still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market.” It also states that slow back to school sales have increased inventory, which is hampering Windows 8 sales.
They also have a very strange definition of "four weeks on the market" as the period they're looking at is Oct 22, 2012 - Nov 14 2012... which includes 5 days prior to Windows 8 being released. With Microsoft selling about 1.5M licenses a day in these initial weeks, 5 days where sales are practically zero is a lot to include in the data.
But the local computer shop or data recovery firm sure cares, as secure boot eliminates their ability to bypass windows to recover data direct from storage.
That is FUD, lies, and misinformation.
a) secure boot can be easily disabled within bios/uefi on all x86 units, which is all current Windows 8 desktops, all current windows 8 laptops, and a big chunk of the windows 8 tablets too.* So if you drag in a working windows 8 pc, they can boot their favorite live cd with minimal effort.
b) Worst case they'd pull the hard drive out of the defective unit and just extract the data directly. Half the data recovery jobs a computer shop deals with are due to hardware failure where the laptop or desktop is fried, and pulling the hard drive out is the smart thing to do if the rest of the PC hardware doesn't work or is failing or is unreliable.
Secureboot is nearly irrelevant in this scenario.
Really, the only people secureboot currently impacts in any non-trivial way are people who want to dual boot linux and windows 8 on the same PC.
* WinRT tablets are the exception, but those devices are very much ipad market product, and data recovery would proceed along the same lines it does for an ipad. Can you boot an ipad up off your favorite linux live CD to recover the data? Of course not. Same thing.
Joe Shmoe will care that the latest virus to infest his system leaves his data corrupted and secure boot prevents any remedial actions.
Joe Shmoe doesn't think that far ahead.