That “Downgrade” to XP Option Sure Worked Wonders, Didn’t It?
You wouldn’t know it from the protests over Microsoft’s decision to retire Windows XP at the end of June or the PC users exercising their Windows Vista downgrade rights, but Vista is actually selling quite well. Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said today that sales of Windows Vista have reached 140 million copies worldwide. “That’s a very rapid sales rate,” Gates explained.
Sure is. Especially for an operating system that’s met with such a middling reception. That said, you’ve got to wonder if the 140 million copies to which Gates refers are deployed copies or licenses sold. Because if it’s the latter, the number would be decidedly less impressive. It wouldn’t really account for volume licenses sold to corporate customers, copies pre-installed on OEM computers, and copies downgraded to Windows XP. And Gates has made exactly this type of oblique statement before, the last time Microsoft announced Vista sales figures.
Comments
My bet is the numbers are licenses and DO include the VPAs, which as I outlined in a blog post a couple of weeks ago may represent hundreds of thousands of machine within government that never get upgraded at all. One agency I know of is just now looking into Vista and finding that almost none of their home-grown applications work even though they signed the VPA for Vista long ago.
The government (taxpayers) essentially are paying for vaporware… software they can’t use, but a promise of some sort of support from MS for whatever they are actually running. My experience is that the “support” people sent out are not only billed at an hourly rate (so you pay the VPA to get the right to support for which you must also pay) and consist of a warm body who knows how to query the MSDN database and has a couple of secret 800 numbers.
Why should we have to guess though? Don’t Wall Street analysts have the clout to demand verifiable numbers?
Of course a sale is a sale, regardless if the customer gets any benefit from the product at all. Of course if one wants to gauge the direction of mindshare for the company you have to look no further than purchasing managers that have been burned ore than once already for VPAs they don’t actually need.
Posted by Mac Beach at May 8th, 2008 at 12:52 pm140 million sold. Big deal. Anyone can sell. Do people LIKE Vista? No. Do people recommend Vista by word of mouth? No. Are businesses going to upgrade/downgrade to Vista? No.
I beta-tested Vista. Hated it. I installed the full version in hopes of SP1 making it ‘better’. It didn’t. I hate it. I’m back to XP.
And I’m buying another Mac (owned one way back in 1988). There’s a GOOD reason why Apple’s 2nd quarter results were so good. It ain’t all about iPod either.
Posted by Aaron Jamey at May 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am