March 26, 2007 10:19 AM PDT
Microsoft sells 20 million Vista licenses
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By comparison, in its first two months, Windows XP sold 17 million copies, Microsoft said.
"We are encouraged to see such a positive consumer response to Windows Vista right out of the gate," Corporate Vice President Bill Veghte said in a statement Monday. "While it's very early in the product lifecycle, we are setting a foundation for Windows Vista to become the fastest-adopted version of Windows ever."
Of course, the PC market has grown substantially since XP hit store shelves. In 2001, worldwide PC shipments totaled 136 million units, while last year the industry shipped 227 million computers, according to IDC.
And Microsoft's figures include not only boxed copy sales and those included on new PCs, but also people who bought Windows XP during the holiday season and have applied for their free Vista upgrade since the mainstream launch of Vista.
In an interview, Windows marketing director Bill Mannion said that the upgrade program did help the sales figures, but said it wasn't the driving factor. "It's boosting the overall number, but it's certainly not the core component of the 20 million," he said.
PC makers also say that they are encouraged by early results for Windows Vista.
"Overall we've seen a pretty good reaction to the release of Vista," said Kenneth Walker, chief technologist at PC maker Gateway.
Both Microsoft and the PC makers also say they are seeing a shift to higher-end versions of Vista. When XP made its debut in 2001, it came in two main flavors--Home and Professional. The company eventually added the Tablet PC and Media Center editions, and over time, Media Center became the dominant version on retail shelves. Vista comes in six flavors--Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, as well as a Starter Edition only sold on new PCs in emerging markets.
Mannion said that Microsoft is even seeing better-than-expected sales of the pricey Ultimate edition. "We have relatively modest expectations for Ultimate, but it's exceeding that on both new PCs and the packaged product."
Walker said that Gateway has seen more customers on its Web site choosing the Ultimate edition than it initially expected. Customers who go to the Web often buy high-end machines, and those buyers may want to try to "future-proof" their PC by opting for the most full-featured version they can get.
He likens it to car buyers who buy more horsepower than they need. "How many people buy the V8 instead of the V6?" Walker said. Or how many go with the optional towing package, "even though they have nothing to tow?"
Hewlett-Packard, which sells most of its PCs through retail stores, said it is has seen "not much interest" in the Ultimate version thus far. The company said it has seen consumers opt for PCs with more memory as well as machines with Windows Vista Home Premium.
Bruce Greenwood, vice president of notebooks and North American channel sales for HP, said that with both laptops and desktops, HP is seeing a shift away from the lowest memory systems and those with Vista Home Basic toward machines with 1GB or more of memory.
Although Microsoft is counting in its sales totals those who bought XP machines late last year and have applied for a free "Express Upgrade" to Vista, most PC makers have only this month started to ship the copies. The program has been a source of considerable frustration for many buyers who have had trouble registering and getting approved for their upgrade.
Mannion said Microsoft hopes such problems are largely a thing of the past.
"That appears to be behind us now," Mannion said. "We understand manufacturers to be in full shipment mode."
and those included on new PCs, but also people who bought
Windows XP during the holiday season and have applied for their
free Vista upgrade since the mainstream launch of Vista."
In other words, every PC with Vista installed on it from the
OEMs. Considering the fact the OEMs are discouraged from any
other version of the opeating system speaks to only one thing.
THIS STORY BLOWS
There new stores every week about another big company or government agency that has issued a "NO VISTA" (and/or Microsoft Office 2007) policy.
Vista will be successful in the long run because the world has yet to break itself of its Windows addiction. But it appears to me, that the majority of Vista sales are consumers that don't know any better, and businesses that are future proofing their licenses by purchasing Vista but installing XP.
Vista has a ton of problems, and wise Windows consumers (isn't that a contradiction of terms?) are waiting for SP1.
As for the HP comment about consumers shunning low-end Vista computers, well if you walk into a Circuit City or CompUSA and the sales people all tell you that you need at least 1 gig of memory and a high-end processor to efficiently run Vista, what are you going to do? Buy a low-end, slow computer?
"Bruce Greenwood, vice president of notebooks and North American channel sales for HP, said that with both laptops and desktops, HP is seeing a shift away from the lowest memory systems and those with Vista Home Basic toward machines with 1GB or more of memory."
Tried a repair funtion but vista could no longer see the nic or wifi pci card.
Nothing worked so I fdisked the HD and reinstalled Windows XP Pro.
Lesson learned: If it isn't broken then don't fix it. I'm staying with XP until Vista comes out with SP1
Most of the "experts" discourage upgrading existing PC's to Vista since there is little substantial difference from XP SP2.
I guess Microsoft wants to make Vista upgrades trendy... "Everybody's going for it, why aren't you?"
piece of spyware for Microsoft? Granted, many other issues have
taken the spotlight, but given the fact of their XBox support
debacle, maybe that should be revisited.
You have to be careful with MS licenses, sometimes large enterprise customers will simple buy the license for Vista but continue to run XP for a few more years, simply because its doesn't make sense to buy the outdated XP CAL.
I would like to see Retail Box unity to Retail Box unit sales comparison. Then I would like to see Boxed unit as a percentage of total computers in US. That gives the best view of how consumers are reacting to vista.
I see people say large government org's well your right, thats how it was with 95, 98 2000 XP. Heck I had one division here just finish upgrading from 98 to XP. But I also have another division with 400 seats going with Vista.
I know many are OSX fans or Linux fans, but the reality is Linux is far away from being stable enough at the desktop side to be viable.
And wait all the Ubuntu/SuSe fan's. Please think about it for a minute or 3.
What are the issues? Well have you ever tried to get the Nvidia or ATI drivers to work proper? I don't mean the native open source ones that don't support direct rendering, or do so at a snails pace. I mean the ones that have proper hardware support?
We support a unit on it, and its a pain in the arse. As we type this I am struggling through 100 broken desktops that just got Xorg 7.3 and are struggling to redo the ATI drivers due to the missing linux-kernel-headers breaking the rpm build.
Have you taken the time to look at the list of bug fix's still in process? I am boggled at this last issue since it was well documented back in November about this issue with the kernel headers but it still pushed out out on the 21st.
Many of those people in that unit use laptops with external monitors on a docking chasis. One thing that drives me nuts with Linux, is the inability to properly support the senario. And I am sure someone will say just do this. Trust me, we have a guy here who loves linux, and he has posted on forums spoken to dev's at Novell. And the proplem still exists, as well as the issue with KVM's and switching back and forth.
Or the openoffice habbit of just stopping, sure no blue screen but sitting at a totally no responsive screen, where you are force to alt-ctril-backspace is no fun either.
There is lots of promise in Linux still I love what beryl shows off (when it don't crash)
but really when a person uses a desktop PC, and needs something beyond just a nice browser platform. Walking someone through the process of making sure they have all the proper packages installed, then walking them through making them through generating the rpm, for the ATI or Nvidia driver, and telling them to please make sure they tell you when they see a warning.. why call it a warning when its a show stopper?
Anyhow, then having them init 3 install the RPM run SAX, make sure its looks okay then walk them through VI to edit the xorg.conf to make sure all the needed entries are there, then running glxinfo makeing sure it all looks good.
Then having them reboot only to find that the 1280*1024 they selected is for some reason screwed up at 800*600 then walking them through fixing the error in the include file to fix the bugged install to set the horizontal frequenzy back to what it should be for the damm standard NEC LCD screen.
Just for a video driver, when they can use XP or Vista go to the site, download the driver run it reboot and 99% of the time its fine.
What really is a **** off is when the system does the X11 upgrade and sure you don't know you have an issue yet, it don't ask you to reboot, you don't even know the new package is not running yet, your still using the old package, then you reboot nd wonder why your sitting at a command prompt and open your log file and wonder *** (EE) no device driver
That is one example of the pain trying to support a standard Linux build in a productive work environment where it uses more then basic apps.
Don't get me started with the guy who filled his system with MP3's deleted them and did not empty the trash and rebooted unable to get a gui since there was insufficent space .....
After all, if Vista is selling like hotcakes, then why the big fat desire to offer even more discounts? To wit:
[i]"The program gives users a 10 percent discount on up to five additional Windows Vista licenses. Customers are eligible to buy licenses for the edition of Windows Vista that they already own. That is, a customer with Home Premium can buy up to five additional Home Premium licenses, but cannot purchase a combination of Home Premium and Ultimate licenses, for instance."[/i]
...class?
(...anyone else thinking that the *cough*MSFTpressrelease*cough* CNET article is just Yet Another Instance of Lowered Expectations on MSFT's part?)
/P
Why do the big car manufatures who have the #1 auto's offer cash back rebates?
And on and on and on...
Sever stability IE no user interaction at console is different then a user who is a the screen. And no Linux does not domaintes the server market 24% of new buissiness in the replacement of older UNIX, Big iron box's is not dominate.
On the drivers, not everyone uses just word processing there are people who need other apps that are either media heavy, driver heavy GIS anyone.
And no its not as easy as you say. You don't just download it and run it. If you did you better check your system, your drivers are not installed.
Here are three links for explanation for you.
http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/ati-installer-HOWTO.html
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17340.html
http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Driver_HOWTO
Your right it should mark it for delete. But see there is a bug when you hit 100%. It does not work.
If you are running Beryl or COPMIZ, your system at 100% will get extremly slow...very very very slow. Like 5 minutes to drag your mouse to the trash..
It will say it emptied.. and will look empty, so you will reboot thinking you are okay.
And you will crash..
Then you will google for the answer and find oh wow seams like lots of people had this issue.
So you will open a terminal window and delete the files in the trash.
Try this in google... find out for your self.
linux full disk delete trash
Now once you fixed the problem you will now find your trash will always think it has trash to empty but you can fix that also.
You can also find this bug well documented on bugzilla..
http://en.opensuse.org/Submit_a_Bug#Searching_for_Bugs
So..
MS spins it daily, there are people who's job is to figure out how to spin it and bend people's oppinions.
Vista won't even install on my computer at all and I have a new computer, so there.
it was a dell inspiron with windows vista ultimate, 2 gigs of 667ghz ram(upgrade), 2.0ghz c2d (macbook has 2.16). it was $2,012 before any rebates, $12 more than the macbook.
- Let them blow...
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by Razzl
March 26, 2007 1:28 PM PDT
- ...smoke up CNET's recycle bin. We know those numbers are cooked and they can only keep this up for a quarter or two before the huge base of people who are buying new computers THAT DON'T WORK RIGHT BECAUSE OF VISTA and people who have damaged their existing files with "upgrades" warn enough of the populace that even sales of new computers will be affected. Microsoft can't fix what's wrong here enough to stave off loss of market share to Mac and even Ubuntu (which, honestly, is the only flavor of Linux most newbies will ever try, but it's getting better every day).
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See all 181 Comments >>At some point the market will punish even a monopolist if they fail badly enough, which is what Microsoft has done here...