Bill Gates yesterday told the WinHEC audience that Microsoft had sold close to 40 million copies of Vista.
“The sales number, for the operating system’s first 100 days of broad availability, represents license sales into the channel. However, the number of Vista PCs sold is probably much less,” Joe Wilcox reports for Microsoft Watch.
“The 40 million number has a much more credible ring than Microsoft’s April proclamation of 20 million licenses sold in 30 days. The 20 million figure included coupons Microsoft offered for Vista PCs sold during the holidays,” Wilcox reports.
“The second 20 million is the first real indication of how well Windows Vista is selling. Because of the coupon program, the time period associated with the first 20 million license sales was longer than 30 days; more like four months. In addition, Microsoft offered two separate licenses—for Windows XP and Vista—for each PC sold during the coupon period,” Wilcox reports.
Wilcox reports, “Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD, said that the 40 million figure ‘certainly seems plausible.’ Doing some quick shipment calculations, based on one-third of year sales, he figured Vista sales to be in the ’35 to 37 million range with 3 to 5 million in the channel.'”
“”Sold’ does not equal ‘deployed,” said Al Gillen, IDC’s research vice president of system software. ‘If you went out and tried to find the portion of that 40 million that went into businesses, you will find a lot of the machines have been downgraded to Windows XP, which is perfectly legit,'” Wilcox reports.
“The sales figure is through last week, which means about 20 million Vista licenses sold in about two months—from March 1 to early May,” Wilcox reports.
Wilcox reports, “Analyst projections for the current quarter are encouraging, but the real crunch will come in June. If OEMs and retailers start heavy discounting or quarterly PC shipments come up short, there will be a sign of much unsold Vista inventory.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, mix up some communal reinforcement, a heaping helping of the bandwagon effect, and some nice warm groupthink and what do you get? Microsoft Windows’ market share.
Could the good Mr. Gates tell us how many copies have been ACTIVATED? Should be easy to get that number and brag about it.
If it’s anything to brag about.
I wish Bill Gates could say how many people are happy with their Vista purchase…I could probably count that number on my own two hands.
Activated do not the whole truth,
how about deactivated and uninstalled?
Does anyone know how many copies of XP were sold in the same time period as Vista? That would be intersting.
It’s doubtful you’d need both hands, unless, of course, you’re missing 8 digits.
MW: number
I dislike M$ and Doze, but articles like this don’t mean much. OK, M$’s sales are, for now, slow. So what? Because of the tremendous business penetration of Doze, all it means is that it’ll take 6 months longer for Doze to out sell more than 5 years worth of OS X.
It’d be great if we were talking a complete implosion for Vista, but all the Apple boosterism in the world doesn’t change the fact that Vista will be on probably 500,000,000 more computers than OS X three years from now.
The important thing is for OS X to continue the great run it’s having now. Maybe in a few years the ratio will be reversed, but anybody that thinks a POS Vista means the end of M$’s domination is kidding themselves.
Yes indeed, and many of those early adopters could be early rejectors.
No matter how bad Vista is, because MS has a lock on the PC market, they are going to sell(?) a ton of product. The only way OSX will make a dent in Vista sales is for Apple to license OSX to PC manufacturers. I know Apple fanboys would explode if this happened, but the idea of business is to make money. I do not believe this would negatively impact Mac hardware sales, in fact, I think it would probably be a big boost for Mac sales.
So how many of these were licences people with corporate programs got automatically, ie if 20 million corporate seats were under a valid upgrade program then they all count as sold, even if Microsoft did not get any money for them.
I think activations is a good way to count this
40 millions turds is a really big, steaming pile. I hope they filed an environmental impact statement.
Let’s wait until we start seeing some of the market share numbers based upon on-line usage. That should tell the real tale.
C1: “Could the good Mr. Gates tell us how many copies have been ACTIVATED? Should be easy to get that number and brag about it.
If it’s anything to brag about.”
Since this was at a shareholder meeting, and I’m pretty sure there was a question and answer section as there pretty much always is at shareholder meetings..
WHY THE HELL WAS THIS NOT ASKED AT THE MEETING????
Don’t people who have money invested in Microsoft want to know this kind of stuff?
What the hell is wrong with these people?
To me that seems THE MOST RELEVANT QUESTION THEY COULD HAVE ASKED AT THE MEETING!!
More important than whatever other boneheaded junk they asked instead.
Well I guess it doesn’t take a lot of IQ to invest in Microsoft since the stock has been going NOWHERE for like.. what.. 5? 6 years?
Oh all the people i know, about 2 are running vista, other bought systems with XP and got a coupon but have yet to switch. Many say Not till a major service pack. Well that is understandable, i mean it is M$, so you expect it. I have Vista, purchase to train on since I am in the IT field. But loaded it once with bootcamp, and never again, i didnt even activate it. 30 days passed and i deleted it from the HD. But what does this really mean for M$ nothing much, just that XP is selling as it was before and they still are making money.
MSFT is worth less today than it was in March of 2000. Talk about making a bad investment….
Chant from MS headquarters:
“We’re number one!”
“We’re number one!”
“We’re number one!”
—- wait, what do you mean that this is not the line for the best and most popular operating system????
“Actually you are number one, in the line for ——-“
—- Insert your own words here.
— “Line for companies going straight to He-l.”
—” Line for the worst product sold to the most people ever!”
etc
WHY THE HELL WAS THIS NOT ASKED AT THE MEETING????
—
Easy.You realize that accounting-wise it makes no fucking difference to the bottom line, right? They could be in a warehouse in Alaska… MS already has the money.
As for the time, they’ve been selling Vista licenses since last year… remember, the vouchers they put with PC’s?
Jack, you don’t know Jack about OS X licensing or Mac sales. Go read some Daniel Eran!
How many people bought a Vista licence (sale #1) with a new PC, then went out and bought an OEM copy of XP (sale #2) to replace it?
How many PCs are sold every year? That’s the question that we should ask?
The more copies of Vista that are actually installed, the more unhappy Microsoft customers there will be. Not only that, but once Leopard is released, Apple will be keen to point out the advantages of Leopard over Vista. I haven’t heard a single positive response to Vista yet – if it works, it is slow – and mostly it doesn’t work (no drivers, software incompatible…) or the security option drives people crazy.
I also find myself wondering about the language Bill Gates uses. He is “amazed” by the number of copies sold – well, amazed good, or amazed bad? Either way, let’s face it, at least Vista is selling some copies – and this allows Microsoft to deflect attention from the non-selling Zune.
My dad recently bought an iMac at a military PX which came with a free copy of Vista. He doesn’t intend to load it but I’m guessing it’ll count as a “sale.” He’s a lifelong Windows user by the way!
Windows will hold on to its lead for years and may even gain a little once the first update/fix is released. But last quarter’s OS X share gain is likely to continue, I’m anticipating some big news from the back-to-school quarter.
the idea of licensing mac os x doesnt make any business sense. ask yourself: what ist the potential gain and what do you risk to lose. microsoft makes around 70 dollars for an oem license. they dont sell much vista ultimate boxes for 399 dollars. so how much is that a year? 25 billion dollars for 90 percent marketshare of 200 million pcs sold. even if apple gets 50 percent of this in 2 years, that makes – lets say – 8 billion the first year and 12-13 billion the second year. at the same time apple risks to loose the same amount of hardware sales. where ist the potential, left alone the passion?
magic word “stand” as in “this is not the final stand”
Does that 40 million include the 39 million copies of Vista Starter Edition installed on PCs sold to unfortunate ans/or unsuspecting third world nations?
A non-Mac forum I’m a member of did a survey as to who runs on each OS. Windows came out with 72%, Mac 16% and even Linux managed 6%, mostly Ubuntu users.
This 95% crap is looking more and more out of date with every passing month.
mike: “Easy.You realize that accounting-wise it makes no fucking difference to the bottom line, right? They could be in a warehouse in Alaska… MS already has the money.”
Ummm.. No.
Makes HUGE difference. This is a STOCKHOLDER meeting. This means people want to know what the FUTURE value of MS is going to be, and that is VERY much directly effected by how many copies of Vista are ACTIVATED.
Sure, MS might have got money for Vista for this quarter by shipping them to warehouses or peddling them to box shufflers, but that won’t continue if the product is not popular. And the only way to really tell how popular Vista is (thus the future value of MS) is by checking how many are in USE, not how much money MS got for copies not in use.