“Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report,” Ina Fried reports for CNET News.
“Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product’s first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent,” Fried reports. “‘It’s just not doing well,’ NPD analyst Chris Swenson said of Vista’s performance at retail stores.”
MacDailyNews Take: No, ya think?
Fried continues, “Just because boxed Vista sales are down doesn’t mean they won’t pick up, [Swenson] added. He noted that XP sales peaked a few years after its 2001 launch… But given the fact that only relatively new PCs can be upgraded to Vista, and with standalone sales not showing signs of improving, Swenson said, ‘it’s looking less and less likely that this will happen.'”
“News on the retail front is brighter for Office, which was released to stores the same day as Vista,” Fried reports. “While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales.” [Bold emphasis added by MacDailyNews.]
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: All you need to do is read the Vista reviews. “Five years for a chrome-plated turd” pretty much said it all.
Is this a M$ news site?
A confused cross dresser.
Doh.
I’ve not used Vista to slag it just yet but someday there may be new versions of OS X that are not adopted by the Mac masses as quickly as the prior version of OS.
I’m using 10.3.9 and i’m quite happy with it. It’d be nice to have 10.4 with smart folders, spotlight, etc. but my Mac does everything i need it to do so far. I’d probably upgrade the OS with a new computer.
Vista the Zune of OS’s as it squirts your system resources down the toilet.
I just love the smell of troll bait in the afternoon!
Release the buffoons.
Well at least they have one bright spot
While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales.
Today I spent about 15 minutes using Vista on a friend’s computer. What a mess. I don’t remember the exact verbage of the pop ups so I’ll paraphrase.
I quit Outlook. “Would you like to quit the application?” Yes. “Outlook had problems closing…it will reopen.” WTF?
Wow… I’ve had little experience with Vista, but that’s pretty extraordinary. I’m glad I Bootcamped with XP instead of Vista.
When you can buy a whole PC with Vista for $299, exactly who’s going to buy Vista in a box for $220 (full) or $149 (Upgrade)?
A friend tried to email a picture he had on his brand new Vista system. It wouldn’t let him. I repeat, it would not let him do it. Said he didn’t have the privileges to do so, or something similar. After a visit to his place to see about the problem, it turned out that what he was trying to email was some clip art picture. A picture with a copyright. And Vista wouldn’t let him do that.
Talk about WOW! If I owned a PC and it did that to me I’d take it to Redmond and dump it on their doorstep.
There are now more Vista machines in use than Macs of any flavor. Yet Apple is a success and Vista is a failure? Only in bizzaro world.
“I’ve not used Vista to slag it just yet but someday there may be new versions of OS X that are not adopted by the Mac masses as quickly as the prior version of OS. “
Not necessarily a fair comparison since Apple is primarily a hardware company. Apple’s OS helps sell hardware. Whereas Microsoft is primarily a software company and relies on people upgrading to make money.
I use Vista almost every day on my work laptop, and while I will admit it’s much easier on the eyes than XP (yick. just yick) there really isn’t much to write home about on the functionality front. It just doesn’t do anything that XP didn’t do, other than constantly pester you for attention.
(notice how Reader does that now, too? icon jumps at you for no reason at all. that’s a feature)
I certainly wouldn’t pay upwards of 400 bucks for a decent version if I had to.
Now I’m sure analysts will trot out sales figures for the first 6 months of Leopard for some totally meaningless comparison, and that will be kind of like getting all excited about iTunes Store sales. Does Apple even break down how much they make on boxed OS sales? It can’t be huge… but then, boxed OS sales aren’t a giant slice of Apple’s business so it hardly matters. Every boxed copy of Leopard that sells means someone isn’t buying a new Mac. So as long as the platform is growing, I would think a glut of boxed upgrade sales would mean people just didn’t think too much of your new hardware (after the first few months, of course).
Anyway. What was I saying?
-c
MW: ‘college’
> but someday there may be new versions of OS X that are not adopted by the Mac masses as quickly as the prior version of OS.
Apple wouldn’t care so much as long as customer kept buying new Macs. For Apple, the hardware is the profit center, not the software. But the funny thing is, Apple’s Mac OS X major releases tend to work reliably on older hardware (even some hardware that is not officially supported); in some cases the new release worked better on the same hardware as the previous release due to ongoing optimization efforts. There is a great advantage when one company controls that hardware and OS absolutely, and Apple is exploiting that advantage absolutely.
Here’s another one. Got XP running on a laptop, with a network drive located on my Mac (a folder). While the laptop is away from the network I moved the folder to a different location on the Mac. I would expect this to cause a problem, but what XP said when it tried to access the network drive was “Incorrect password or user name”. Huh? How about “File not found” or something like that? Why does it lead me to believe the problem is login related?
How about this one…. Same scenario, but instead of the laptop being removed from the network, I close the lid and it goes to sleep. While asleep I move the network drive folder on my Mac to another location. When the laptop wakes up and I try to access the folder on the Mac, this time it says “The local device name is already in use.”
What does Microsoft do, pull error messages out of their butt????
These are great days.
You said, “There are now more Vista machines in use than Macs of any flavor. Yet Apple is a success and Vista is a failure? Only in bizzaro world.”
Why the bigger MUST be better focus. Hey, if you get a bad case of the runs, your crap is bigger than my crap and so you crap must be great. ?????
OK, to all the MS trolls out there in MDN land, I give in, Vista, XP, Zune….. Your crap is bigger, smellier, and messier than my crap.
Hmmm, why do I get the feeling that I won that round???
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I remember 1995, when people were saying “Windows 95 interface will kill the MacOS interface”.
And here we are, 12 years later, The Mac GUI is still superior.
someday there may be new versions of OS X that are not adopted by the Mac masses as quickly as the prior version of OS.
That very well could happen.
HOWEVER, we’re very unlikely to have a situation where people are buying and installing older Mac OS X versions onto their new Macs, to use as the primary OS.
“There are now more Vista machines in use than Macs of any flavor. Yet Apple is a success and Vista is a failure? Only in bizzaro world.”
In many cities, the rats outnumber the people.
Thus, in Redmond logic, the rats are a success and humanity is a failure.
Bizzaro world indeed.
Leave it to MS to come up innovation to help Vista sales
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/01/windows-xp-sp3-vista.html
> Leave it to MS to come up innovation to help Vista sales
That BBSpot site might take the place of As the Apple Turns (which I’ve greatly missed over the last two years).
Judging by all the things you report about MS. I think you should call yourselves Microsoft daily crap.
That’s great, but why did you say it twice?
A couple of weeks ago I helped a fellow worker setup his new Vista equipped Dell home PC. I tried to talk him into getting XP but he wouldn’t listen. That had to be one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had. And what made it even worse was the fact that he wanted People PC dial-up instead of broadband. It’s a good thing there weren’t any guns within hand reach or I wouldn’t be here today.