239 million PCs sold last year (from Gartner), that's an average 20 million a month, so 40 million is 2 months worth of average PC sales. Presumably the sales figures include the Christmas Vista vouchers.

So Jan Feb, March, April, and the Christmas vouchers.... results in 40 million units. About 50% takeup on new PCs.

Is this correct? Vista's shipped on 50% of new PCs?

That would fit the story from Feb that shrink wrap sales of Vista were about a third less in revenue compared to XP (higher price, lower volume, overall worse):

http://www.crn.com/software/197006491

From what height...?

Seriously, though, is that 40m copies shipped by MS, or 40m purchased and installed? Important difference!

...how many of them 40million (or however many) copies of Vista sold were OEM, and promptly wiped and had XP installed over them?

Let's try something: Have the operating system priced and delivered separately. Then show the sales figures.

Lacking that, since Vista has the new fangled "authentication/registration" process, tally those numbers! They DO have them, don't they??

700meg to run an OS? No thank you. I need that memory for other things... like writing productive software.

So I spent a month trying to find a reasonable laptop 'without Vista'. Where is the option to buy a computer 'without an OS' or with your chosen OS? Kind of smacks me of last time Microsoft got it's wrists slapped...

Not to mention, practically every laptop produced in the last couple years has 'VISTA' installed. Go look at some online stores offering older laptops...vista... vista...vista. Laptops with 512meg running Vista...

Something happened because I would guarantee a majority of those laptops originally arrived at the vendors with XP. Why do they know have vista? Perhaps the vendors thought it would be a 'selling feature' to sell a laptop with VIsta that can barely run it? Strikes me as some alternative 'incentive'....

Don't know what to make of it, but these have been my observations.... you can do your own math....

Vista sales figures are nothing of the sort. They represent the number of copies of Vista shipped for sale, not the actual number sold. All this could mean is that MS has stuffed the channels more rapidly this time around in an attempt to make it appear that Vista is a success compared to XP. Whether or not Vista has actually sold twice as much as XP is something that we mortals outside of Redmond's bean counters will never find out.

These guys know what the actual figures really are. They are saying all kinds of things (here and before) that seem to indicate that they are really getting afraid of the competition. Linux, Apple, and Google represent the future and while Microsoft will still be here, once the tower starts to topple, it comes down fast.

Writer after writer are telling the truth about Vista and Microsoft. MS fanboys like to keep their head in the sand and pretend that if my machine works or has minor problems then the world is still a great place. Weird.

I think that the next year or two will be a very interesting time but not for Microsoft.

en

Me II the dominate one, I think not...sounds more like the bean counters have jimmy'd up some fancy sounding numbers to keep the boss happy.

Wonder how long its going to be before the sh*t hits the fan over OEM versions of Office 2007 being medialess. That's right in sunny Australia a customer buying OEM office 2007 with their new PC gets an EMPTY dvd case with a licence key label on it. How pathetic is that..... Ol' scumbag is too cheap to supply a 50cent piece of plastic, and expects the customer after having paid up to $500au to buy an office licence to pay extra to get an install disk or have it reinstalled by the oem should , god forbid, their OS gets vandlised or corrupted.

OK, so Microsoft has sold 40,000,000 copies of Windows Vista. Let's take that at face value. What wasn't mentioned was what number system was used.

4000 0000 base-16 = 1,073,741,824

40 000 000 base-10 = 40,000,000

40 000 000 base-8 = 1,048,576

40 00 00 00 base-4 = 262,144

That's it, the signs I've been waiting for. M$ has trouble: a huge number of people ask DELL (heaven forbid) to install Linux on their Laptops; they ship a new OS that's crap and they don't know how to fix it.

But really, it's just me fantasizing and doing wishful thinking because M$ did not get rich by developing great software and probably never will.

As long as people will buy PCs (and that's going to be a while) M$ has money. Because most people either never heard of Linux or have no clue how to install anything (except spyware of course) and M$ has a firm grip on those OEMs which will not ship anything else in the foreseeable future.

The savvy will switch and the clueless will stay. Which is the bigger group?

Micha

to the anonymous poster: If you need a laptop without vista, go see Dell. They're happy to ship you one with XP (and soon Ubuntu)

I've been running vista the last month, and its the x64 flavour (went to order x32 version, but miss clicked lol) which is even more tricky to get drivers for older hardware.

I have yet to have any real bad problems, If your building a new system, I would recommend Vista as a good stable OS. Most problems seem to lie with conflicts with old (older than Creative X-Fi) sound cards.

Home Premium OEM is cheap enough, go out and buy it.

I'm actually surprised by the number of common people who DO know that Vista has problems.

Only last week, I was asked out-of-the-blue by my 60-year old dentist what I thought about Vista.

I said "There are some technical issues that deter me from wanting to use it right now."

His response was "Well I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Bloody useless rubbish."

Then his nurse interjected with "Oh yes, my son-in-law has had a nightmare with Vista lately...." etc.

I also was talking to a lawyer recently who asked me where he could buy new laptop without Vista installed on it.

I guess M$'s marketing dept has succeeded in getting Vista to the top of everyone's agenda, just not in the way they wanted!

Vista Ultimate Upgrade is indeed the best selling Vista at amazon.com, coming in at 61st on the software best sellers list. Of course it is outsold by Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 7.0, and it is many many places behind both XP Home and XP Pro on the bestsellers list. But Ultimate it is the best selling retail version of Vista.

OTOH, try to buy a new PC without Vista, and you'll find one shining example: Mac. Pick up a copy of XP OEM to go with it if you must. Vista is selling to people who don't see a choice. It's still a monopoly in their minds.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have lied hard and repeatedly about Vista, Zune, Xbox, and Windows Mobile. But the game is up for the bully boys. Customers finally aren't afraid to disagree.

Given that most box shifters have been putting Vista on, this figure is not really that impressive.

M$ must have a figure that would be interesting though... Stats from their WGA, which would show how many of those 40million copies are actually being used, and not been replaced with XP. I know of quite a few just in my office which arrived with Vista, and were promptly reformatted to XP from out site licence pack.

You forgot, "or aren't willing to pay a small premium for a quality machine that runs OS X."

I'm another dentist who wouldn't touch Vista with a barge-pole. However, I take great exception to be referred to as a 'common person' by Rob.

I actaully that a surprising number of computer vendors in this area are recommending Windows XP over Vista, especially for budget computers, because of the significantly lower costs.

Personally, I'll be happy as Linux, Open Source and Apple in general keep growing, thanks in part to Microsoft.

One important problem with Linux, Apple and other *nix based systems has been incompatibility, both with games (Important for me) And other apps. The other applications have for the better part long been caught up to or surpassed by open source software and with the growth of Linux on the market, more and more games will likely be shipped with *nix support, even if said shipping does take place several weeks or even a couple of months after the Windows release.

Once that starts happening, I'll be happily dumping Windows entirely and going on to use Gentoo, Debian or one of the many other good Linux distros.

Microsoft has always played the numbers game, in their financial reporting, and especially their "sales" figures. I don't even come close to believing Bill's figure of 40m.

The key difference with Vista is that *mainstream* media are being critical, pointing out the problems it's causing some people, and even worse, are running stories about OSX and Linux more often. Apple are also laying the boot into Windows with their "Hello I'm a Mac" ads. Microsoft haven't really had to deal with this level of open criticism before, not in front of an audience of "normal" people anyway.

The average Joe who doesn't read techie news sites used to be totally in the dark about Microsoft's issues, but is now more likely to be aware that Vista is turning out to be a problem child, and that there are alternatives (even if they wouldn't have a clue how to use or install them). Or more likely they're comfortable with XP, which they've had many years to get used to, warts and all, and really don't *want* to change.

To put the fine point on it:

M$ quotes their "shipped" ledger, but, not on the SEC reports! There, it is a mis-representation leading to government AUDIT!

I know that 1% is damaged goods!

Well, I run all Open Source OSes, and consider M$ 100% "damaged goods"!

Then, normal return for no sales usually is upto 10%!

Let's add the industry standard 5% for Theft, and other losses!

Well, that accounts for as much as 16% of NO SALES!...

No wonder they quote "Shipped" units, and not "Delivered" units!

Sorry Graham! I didn't mean you were common. Far from it.

When I said "common people" I meant homosapien, as opposed to homocompusapien. The difference between our species is sometimes subtle to detect, but obvious when you know what to look for. For example, when you being counting, you probably start on "1" and not "0".

Remember after a month they said they'd moved 20 million copies? And there was various analysis that pointed out that that actually wasn't so hot compared to XP. Well, if they weren't lying, then that means they only moved 20 million more in the following 4 months meaning, the sales rate's actually tanking ...

In Brazil, common people know nothing about Vista. In the web forums, they laugh at you if you confess that you bought a Vista license.

Few people can afford to buy a brand computer. Almost everybody have their computer assembled by a knowledgeable person, who installs a "legitimized" copy of Windows XP.

A few knowledgeable persons have installed Windows XP on a virtual machine under Ubuntu GNU/Linux and are living an unconcerned life now. An accountant I know has been trying to run the accounting server application under Wine because Windows XP on virtual machine runs too slow, but gave up yesterday. He is going to add memory to the server and run VMWare on it under Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). The 6 clients are still using the client part of the accounting application under Windows, but it seems that it can work through a web browser, then that requirement will disappear.

It seems that this accounting office will be able to stretch the usable life of its equipment with the addition of 512 MB of RAM and a new $300 Samsung laser printer!

As you can see, nobody here is even thinking about Windows Vista! That is common wisdom in my perception.