“Microsoft’s claim of 20 million Vista licenses sold simply doesn’t add up when trying to assess who realistically bought them in the time frame – ‘in the opening month’ – stated in today’s press release. Further, the press release claims that ‘Windows Vista made a splash in its debut’. What kind of Kool-Aid are they drinking up there in Redmond? Who spiked the Windows Vista-logo soda cans?”
They probably are counting OEM licensing deals. I could see someone like Dell negotiating for a few million licenses in a one month period for the machines they will be shipping in the next few months.
Then again there are hundreds of millions of Windows users worldwide maybe 20 million people did buy a license or a new computer.
Stockholders (or is that 2?)
Interesting I’ve never heard about Microsoft having their books audited.
“Interesting I’ve never heard about Microsoft having their books audited.”
The gov’t doesn’t care if you lie about how many of product X you sold, they only care about numbers (and if they add up correctly).
It’s interesting you should mention auditing though…to my knowledge, MS has never had any accounting issues in the past 30-odd years. Worthy of a pat on the back? Nah, but interesting enough.
They probably did sell 20 million licenses… to Dell, HP, etc. Mostly OEM licenses installed on PCs that are sitting in warehouses waiting to be sold. That or on the shelves of Best Buy.
If I were a newspaper publisher I could ship 20 million copies to news stands and say I’m that popular when in fact my newspaper is sitting at the bottom of a bird cage.
I wouldn’t be surprised; I remember when purchasing OEM licences for Windows, I would purchase them in bulk – 5,000 at a time, then sell them over the next 6months or so – IIRC, the amount saved when purchasing in bulk is a reasonable size when you compare it to the margins that PC’s have on them.
Hence the reason I am always sceptical when companies announce figures; its like when Microsoft talks about ‘revenue from products have increase’ and yet, never actually give the number of new clients won – prime example of that would be Oracle, which has had, for a period of time, sustained increases in profit and revenue and yet their customer numbers stayed flat.
What would be more interesting to look at would be the numbers who purchased enterprise desktops but installed their old operating system on them before deploying the; also, the number of people removed Windows to install another operating system because the rigmarole about trying to get a refund wasn’t worth going through.
Lots of things can affect numbers – hence, there are lies, damn lies and statistics; you can make numbers say what ever you want them to say; when the rate of reported crime goes up, its because of the public’s increased confidence in the police, when the reported crime rate goes down, its because the Police and justice system are reducing repeat offenders and are of a greater deterant to would be criminals.
I find this story humorous. I cannot believe that anyone would question figures like this, it is EASILY conceivable that they are correct. In fact, these figures are so easily estimated one could have guessed 20 million.
For months Windows XP machines and OEM licences included a licence for Windows Vista; that alone adds up to a lot of license “sales”.
Even easier to understand is that the vast majority of machines come bundled with Windows and as of late 60 million machines are sold per quarter. If 75% of machines came with Vista it is easy to come up with the rest elsewhere.
Among other sources here is one of the ones I used:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-vistas-twofold-sales-…
Agreed. I’m surprised they talk as a license sold to OEMs shouldn’t be treated as a sold license. Whatever OEMs do with licenses they buy, it’s up to them. Microsoft doesn’t care: they already sold it.
This attitude according to which one could go everywhere and lie as a kid is very disappointing.
“Agreed. I’m surprised they talk as a license sold to OEMs shouldn’t be treated as a sold license. Whatever OEMs do with licenses they buy, it’s up to them. Microsoft doesn’t care: they already sold it.
This attitude according to which one could go everywhere and lie as a kid is very disappointing.”
I liked this post. I liked it a lot. Its not a lie its *spin* which is like a lie only much worse. Microsoft not only has to sell products it has to be successful. Vista has to be a winner even in the *absence* of any competition. It not a liked company but is perceived as a winning company.
It competes in a market with competing products that are cheaper by an order of magnitude or completely free. It can only survive by being a *monopoly*…and a rock solid one at that. They are terrified that anyone will say “the emperor wears no clothes”
I bought two 500gb hard drives, a 4gb pen drive for less than the cost of Home Premium. Thats a lot of hardware I can buy rather than downgrade to Vista.
Someone put this better
I don’t know why people are so keen to claim that Vista is not selling.
Here are a few points:
1. XP was released in a midst of a world-wide econmonic recession.
2. The Windows market is now twice as big for Vista as it was for XP.
Given those two simple points its not difficult to understand how the initial Vista sales could be out-selling the initial sales for XP.
Vista should outsell it, it is a nice product, but you didn’t need to buy a new PC for XP. Vista also doesn’t justify such high price, since it doesn’t offer that much more comparing to XP (I don’t care about eyecandy), even all that security stuff isn’t all that. Also people are more aware of what an OS is now than they were in 2001, so they see there is nothing extra there that would be worth $300 (+ new machine so it runs smooth enough. No one cares it runs smooth on some fanboy’s gaming PC). Eyecandy doesn’t sell as good as Microsoft thought it would. Also Microsoft has a bad reputation/image because of previous mistakes and it’ll take them some time to fix that…that also means Microsoft needs to understand “security” isn’t just some nice word you put in your ads and speeches, they need to prove they’ve made it better. But that’s just my point of view.
>> I don’t know why people are so keen to claim that Vista is not selling.
Probably because people like myself are making a killing over the past month and a half charging people $200 a pop (+$150 for the copy of windows if they don’t have one) in labor to install XP Pro over Vista on new machines or to back out people’s botched Vista install/upgrade attempts?
I swear, on that alone Vista has doubled my income.
Oh wait, that would mean it is selling, and then immediately getting ripped out by the nertz… Nevermind.
Edited 2007-03-27 14:57
World wide economic recession? better tell that to Australia and New Zealand that were growing at a reasonable rate at that time, along with China, India and most other places in the world.
…and someone scored me DOWN for saying this in the last “20 million” thread.
The article does do some interesting math to see if the claim is true or just number padding. For instance
Notice how he isn’t saying that, without a doubt MS is padding the numbers. What he is trying to say, IMO, is that it is highly likely that MS is full of it.
I’m a Windows user, big time, I think in Windows.
But..Why buy Vista? To have a new OS?
XP is the nutz. MS will have to support it for years.
Wait a while, let them work it out, make them sell you on it.
If you want something pretty, get a new vase. Vista has yet to prove itself, as der master OS.
Edited 2007-03-27 16:37
“What kind of Kool-Aid are they drinking up in Redmond?”?
The same kind they drank when they said XP was “secure”? The same kind they drank when they came up with confirmation-by-password for dangerous, insecure operations (and some not-so-dangerous and not-so-insecure ones)? The same kind they drank when they decided they had a unilateral right to ban everyone else’s operating system from the hard disks of major manufacturers by blackmail?
In short, the same kind they always drink?
To be fair, I’ve been having problems with my Linux machine recently. Assuming they are now over (we can but hope) it seems the cause of endless, seemingly-random rebooting was errors on a Reiserfs volume. I’m not impressed. No operating system, let alone a Unix, should reboot just because of FS errors. Windows may have one up on it in this regard.
OK, have you tried to check the volume? I have seen Windows completely unoperational due to broken FS. It was Fat32 (you know, the thing some OEMs throw on unsuspecting newbies..) but it could not boot even to a safe mode.
I have seen Reiserfs broken pretty hard but I have always been able to repair such a volume…
OK, have you tried to check the volume? I have seen Windows completely unoperational due to broken FS. It was Fat32 (you know, the thing some OEMs throw on unsuspecting newbies..) but it could not boot even to a safe mode.
I have seen Reiserfs broken pretty hard but I have always been able to repair such a volume…
Oh, yes, it’s checked and the errors are fixed…hopefully this was the one and only cause of the rebooting. I accept there are some situations when a broken fs means Linux can’t boot, but if it CAN boot (because the errors, say, are on a relatively non-essential fs like /var) then imo at worst when it encounters errors it should shut down into single user mode. The problem had me thinking it was power supply, cpu, memory, allsorts (especially since I have had verified power-supply issues with this system before).
As I say, HOPEFULLY it is now fixed…Compiling portage, since it was fond of going down when emerging stuff – probably because the errors were on /var. Just hope they aren’t caused by hardware failure….
Thanks for the info.
Off topic, but I do have a couple of comments.
You might want to make sure smartmon-tools is installed and running and set to notify you of problems either via email or using smart-notifier.
If you have a spare partition, you might also want to benchmark current ext3 against reiserfs. The results may surprise you. In particular, benchmark that usage pattern for which common wisdom says that reiserfs is supposed to shine: Lots of little files in a directory.
Again. The performance results may surprise you.
Make sure directory index is enabled:
tune2fs -o dir_index <device name>
Reiserfs is still much more efficient with space in that situation, however.
-Steve
Edited 2007-03-27 19:14
You might want to make sure smartmon-tools is installed and running and set to notify you of problems either via email or using smart-notifier.
Thanks! It looks like my particular problem is now solved (and thus was sw- not hw-related) but this should help in future 😉
If you have a spare partition, you might also want to benchmark current ext3 against reiserfs. The results may surprise you. In particular, benchmark that usage pattern for which common wisdom says that reiserfs is supposed to shine: Lots of little files in a directory.
I may just do that. These days however I’m slowly migrating all my filesystems to XFS…
Well, I was responding based upon your comment that you hoped that the original corruption was not hardware related.
XFS is a good filesystem, but also by far the most fragile of the Linux filesystems in the face of unexpected power loss, due to the way it handles transactions that were incomplete at the time of the failure. So make sure you have a good UPS.
The SGI machines it was designed for had big capacitors and supported a hardware “powerfail” interrupt to allow emergency cleanup in the event of a power failure.
PC hardware has neither.
See this for more info:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/6/27/217
Edited 2007-03-27 23:37
“In short, the same kind they always drink? ”
They must have gotten resistant to it.
Regardless of what the actual number is (if such a thing as “actual number” can even be defined), does it really make a whit of difference?
It’s pretty clear that while some are excited about Vista, the masses really are not.
Are the masses *ever* excited about a new OS? No, they aren’t. They care about getting the kids to school on time, how their team is doing in the finals, making sure to catch the next episode of their favorite TV show, and what *really* happened to Anna Nicole.
Those who *are* excited are fans who would have been excited no matter what was released, and would buy it whether it was exciting or not. In the same sort of way that, say, Mandriva users would upgrade to a new release simply because they have to experience it for themselves.
In the end, we know with nearly 100% certainty that the vast majority of people will be getting Vista when they buy a new machine. We know that it will take a few years for the Vista installed base to overtake the XP installed base. We know that few applications will be dropping support for XP anytime soon. We know that, like a St. Bernard puppy, Linux and Mac OS will continue nip at Vista’s heels on the desktop, steadily, but slowly, growing over time. That the sun will likely rise tomorrow at the time that the weather man predicts. And that sunrise is about the *only* thing that the weather man will get right. (Our local guy seems to have trouble even with the “current conditions”.)
If any of these things turn out *not* to be true, then *that* will be surprising news.
I’m not complaining that this story was posted. I’m just pointing out that the truth or falsity of Microsoft’s claims are of short term significance, at best. And are totally insignificant at worst.
Edited 2007-03-27 18:34
>>Are the masses *ever* excited about a new OS? No, they aren’t.<<
Windows 3.0 and Windows 95. I don’t know if people were “excited” but sales spiked way up, and right away. XP, by contrast, was a sleeper, it took about three years for XP to overtake Win98 as the most popular desktop.
I remember quite a few people saying “im not getting vista im moving to linux”
Have they moved?
Can you really buy a notebook without vista?
I have 3 machines two of which cant run vista.
Notebook and sparc server
The third machine runs every unix with driver downloads so I have been using solaris 10 and now suse 10.2 and it is amazing how simular KDE and Vista are to some extent (menu)
It also dependes on what many IT “geeks” prefer. Active directory still is nice to use compared to Samba as a PDC and no one can fault microsofts ability to dumb down the level required for system administrators. Once server 20** comes out businesses will be migrating to vista and schools will be migrating to server and vista will be another 5 years away due to lack of funding for computers.
It also dependes on what many IT “geeks” prefer. Active directory still is nice to use compared to Samba as a PDC and no one can fault microsofts ability to dumb down the level required for system administrators. Once server 20** comes out businesses will be migrating to vista and schools will be migrating to server and vista will be another 5 years away due to lack of funding for computers.
Why not use Samba + OpenLDAP? I’ve set up a tonne of places that combo.
Unless you’re really going to take advantage of the ‘Windows only’ enterprise features of active directory, you’re better off going for the *NIX solution quite frankly.
“””
I remember quite a few people saying “im not getting vista im moving to linux”
Have they moved?
Can you really buy a notebook without vista?
“””
Yes. I run into converts who decided not to go the Vista path all the time in the Ubuntu forums.
My favorite source for notebooks, desktops, and servers is http://www.system76.com
Not a Vista in sight.
That number reflects the number of Vista licenses “shipped”. It includes OEMs that purchase in bulk, upgrade coupons given to people that recently purchased a PC with XP, and licenses sent to enterprise customers that automatically receive software upgrades on a periodic schedule.
20 million is not only believable, but it’s shockingly low in my opinion.
The problem is that too many people make a foolish leap into concluding that the number of licenses sold reflects on demand or user base. It simply doesn’t. Just becuase business X receives the license doesn’t mean that they’ll use/resell it immediately (if ever).
Microsoft will automatically sell 20 million licenses of anything they release by default because of prior agreements with OEMs and enterprise customers to provide it. If they re-released MS-DOS, they’d still ship that many licenses – even if not a single copys ever got installed.