“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.
Gates is an asshole.
WOW! 40 million frustrated persons and counting. Gates must be a masochist of the worst kind.
….they perspired heavily as they said that!
three words – delusions of grandeur
Bill Gates is a liar. he said the same thing about zune.
The emperor has no clothes.
Nor brain. Nor testicles.
What he does have is hallucinations and delusions of grandeur.
Vista is similar to OS X. No really. It’s very similar. Except that it sucks.
if apple wanted to, it could do the same. it could license its OS. Stop complaining that Vista comes pre-installed on systems.
You CAN chose not to get a pre-installed OS.
But because Apple won’t license OSX to Dell or whomever, Microsoft will always be the superior performing OS.
No, not delusions of grandeur, delusions of necessity.
I see it this way:
Anti-piracy campaign working
Wow, 40 million copies in 100 days. Despite all the marketing hype, fanboys, and TV ads, OS X got PWNED in 3 months. Bottom line for any business, it’s all about cash & sales, and Apple lost (yet again).
wow….
nobody is upgrading from XP to Vista….not corporate america, not the gamers, not the wall street power users
only sales are to individual consumers who are forced to take visata with their new Best Buy boxes
Gates and Ballmer are so transparent in their “say it enough and the stupid press will believe us”
come on….nobody is BUYING shrinkwraped Vista
(and yeah…the Zune is an incredible hit too…..30% of hard disk player sold in US not including sales through the manufacturer’s company store)
Wait a minute.. Forty million copies? So the uptake is what, about 10 percent or less?
That’s not very impressive for a product that they’re touting as solving all the problems of their previous crap.
-jcr
Wait a minute.. Forty million copies? So the uptake is what, about 10 percent or less?
That’s not very impressive for a product that they’re touting as solving all the problems of their previous crap.
-jcr
Wait a minute.. Forty million copies? So the uptake is what, about 10 percent or less?
That’s not very impressive for a product that they’re touting as solving all the problems of their previous crap.
-jcr
Wait a minute.. Forty million copies? So the uptake is what, about 10 percent or less?
That’s not very impressive for a product that they’re touting as solving all the problems of their previous crap.
-jcr
“You CAN chose not to get a pre-installed OS.”
except that (unless things have changed in the last year) even that counts as a windows sale. run a few web searches on the topic. read the nashing of teeth by linux fans when they found that getting a machine with no OS only meant nothing on the harddisk, it still put money in MS’s pockets.
hell, i wouldn’t put it past MS to call those recent dell sales as a sale for BOTH vista and xp……
http://wis.dm/questions/3981-is-max-os-x-better-then-windows-vista
vote for os x!
This is just Microsoft bending the numbers to make it look good. Once you take into considetation the amount of PC sales that have increased in the past umm..5 years, then that 40 mlilion will look awfully embarassing. China for example, was one of the places Microsoft did extensive advertising campaigns and guess what happened….in all of China, only 255 copies of Vista were sold legally. I think that number speaks for itself, and how much Microsoft twists the numbers to make themselves look good, when underneath it all, its a whole different story.
Mr. Gates, “I’m amazed what total crap Vista is and how the technology press is not to calling us out on it”
It really is a big turd that does nothing more than XP.
realitydisconectitis in full bloom
BILL GATES HAS ONLY ONE TESTICLE!!
[sic]
“But because Apple won’t license OSX to Dell or whomever, Microsoft will always be the superior performing OS.”
Superior performing OS???!!! WTF! Never was NEVER will be!
You on some baaad Crack! Maybe the same stuff that BG is on!
But stay there….the short buss will be along for you and the other doolers soon!
“In an on-stage demonstration, Steven Leonard, senior product manager, showed how a parent could disable access to a child’s music as a punishment for leaving a firewall security feature disabled.”
Wow! A child can disable Vista’s firewall feature. And MS, so thoughfully, gave parents the power to punish their children by denying access to music. If a child is savvy enough to disable the firewall feaure, he/she can surely re-enable access to his/her music. Again I say: “wow!”
“doolers” should be droolers
Although I doubt [sic] will notice!