“Bill Gates said Microsoft was ‘amazed’ at the response to Windows Vista, the company’s flagship product,” Benjamin Romano reports for The Seattle Times.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the response to Windows Vista has been rather amazing. Please see related articles:
Romano continues, “Speaking today to a highly technical audience at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here, the Microsoft founder and chairman said his company had high expectations for the product. ‘I mean, we knew that Vista would become the standard version of Windows,’ Gates said. ‘… But what’s happened in the last 100 days has been beyond our expectations. As of last week, we’ve had nearly 40 million copies sold and so that’s twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release that we had.’”
MacDailyNews Take: The last “major” release of Windows was in October 2001. Fewer computers were being sold to sheep in 2001. Hence, as more boxes are being sold today with Vista pre-loaded, more copies of Vista are being “sold.” As if people knew or were “choosing” what they were buying.
Romano continues, “In March, Microsoft said it had sold 20 million copies of Vista in its first month on the market. The company emphasized then that this was double the initial sales pace of XP…”
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft and their box assemblers have been selling upgrade guarantees for Windows Vista since October 2006. Please see this related article: Microsoft’s numbers game makes Office 2007, Windows Vista launches look better than reality – April 27, 2007
Romano continues, “Gates went on to take a jab at smaller competitors in the operating-system business — notably Apple… ‘In our first five weeks, we’ve matched the entire installed base of any other provider of similar software,’ Gates said.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mac users have made conscious technology choice and are therefore better informed. – Paul Thurrott.
Mix up some communal reinforcement, a heaping helping of the bandwagon effect, and some nice warm groupthink and what do you get? Microsoft Windows’ unit sales and market share.
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