Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China

morpheus83 writes "Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."

244?

That's gross + 100.

Re:"Vista's"

you misread, vista owns the selling in china.

Re:244? Yes 244 master copies

That are 244 master copies for the pirates...

REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista.

Acutally this is helping MS. we all know that piracy is actually what allowed MS to become the de facto and in some realms obligatory operating system. The more users you have the more developers and the more other people want it. It's a cycle and piracy was what helped get MS to the top. That's old history.

Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?

Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)

that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.

once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.

I think that's the real thing that is going on.

in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.

Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista.

Basically MS is the OS equivalent of a crack dealer.

Get you hooked on the cheap/free and then put the price up.

The cheap is edu copies etc, the free is the piracy. But eventually, as you say, the WGA starts to kick in and suddenly your OS starts dropping functionality. When faced with operating system cold turkey what can you do?

It's very clever...

Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista.

After my old University's VLK kicked the bucket and I couldn't get updates, I did what I had to do.

I switched to Ubuntu. I no longer have too much time to fuck around with a computer system, so that's why I picked the hand-holding of Ubuntu. It works well for most of my uses. I still use the crippled version of windows on a small partition to play video games, and I've managed to patch it using the "offline patch" ISO maker some german IT company made to get the latest patches (above and beyond SP2). I still don't trust it in the slightest, so the only thing that gets installed are video games. I don't go to webpages except to download game patches and occasional mods. Otherwise, I stay in Ubuntu.

It went remarkably well. To be totally honest with you, the only thing I want right now is to be able to play Project Reality (BF2 mod), The Hidden and Dystopia (HL2 mods), and NWN1 in Linux. It's probably even possible to do that with Wine or Cedega or something, but they took WAY too much fucking effort the last time I looked into it, and when given a choice between spending 6 hours+ per game, or waiting 2 minutes between a reboot into XP, I'll take the latter. :]

Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista.

NWN1 in Linux

And so it shall be done!!!!

Poof! http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html [bioware.com]

Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale

The average yearly income for a Chinese family is less than a single license for Vista.

Huh? That can't possibly be true unless a Vista license costs more than about $3,000 (the average individual income in China is $1,090; families typically earn two to three times individuals).

You can't look at a country with 1.3 billion people and take average income as a pricing indicator anyway. MS could price Vista for the top 1% of earners there and still end up with 13 million copies sold. You're trying to turn this into an economic issue, but the fact of the matter is the pitiful number that they have sold has to be due to something else - be it piracy, poor product reception, or whatever.

Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale

the average individual income in China is $1,090;

That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.

If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.

A very similar scenario is playing in China where a tiny fraction of the population accounts for nearly all of the income from the economic boom.

+1 You beat me to it

People always post averages like they represent statistics of significant variance. You have to remember, if you have a value range with extremes and you factor numbers associated (in the case population to earnings), you need to get a number that works for the majority, not a number that is in between then extremes to accurately reflect the total. If you take a 100 people and one of them makes a 1000 dollars and the rest make 1 dollar, the total will be 1099, so divided across 100 everyone made 10.99 right? Not really, according to that the vast majority is making 10x more then they really are. *That makes sense in my head even if it didn't come out in the actual post*

Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale

So what you're saying is one of the few real implementations of communism in practice can't be seen as an example of real communism. Please note that I didn't wrap any of those terms in scare quotes. I don't feel it is necessary.

No, I am saying that the propagandists (both Capitalist and Marxist) have mislabelled the thing for various political reasons.

This does not mean that I believe "communism" as envisioned by Marx is workable.

All I am pointing out is that the term "communism" is stolen by Marxists from much older movements. The Bolsheviks (the actual name of the Soviet ideology) re-branded themselves also that way (in order to subsume other competing movements who saw themsevels as "communist" in some way or another) and the rest is history. In later times even the Soviets shied away from the term "communism" and preferred to call themselves "socialist" instead.

Communism as it was historically understood prior to the modern industrial era was all about building ... communes. Hence the name. Self-contained small scale societies based on some sort of deep common cause, usually religious in nature.

When Marx appeared on the scene with his megalomaniac utopian ideas using the term "communism" he sent the capitalists into a proverbial hysteria. And ever since "communism" became synonymous in the West with Marxism, Totalitarianism and whatever latest anti-capitalist boogeyman can be conjured.

Yeah, yeah, I know that communism in it's purest form is only practiced in paneled rooms with all participants comfortably seated in armchairs.

You mean Marxism. Or Libertarianism. Or whole gamut of other wacky unworkable social systems.

As I was pointing out, communism and its communes are alive and well in the USA and Canada. In my province alone there is quite a number of Mennonite communes which are operating strictly in the old-fashioned communist way. Complete with common kitchen and shared ownership of all buildings/land/crops/equipment etc. The amusing part is that those communes are actually quite wealthy since they are nearly completely self-sufficient while selling their excess crops to outsiders. They have literally millions of dollars in the bank each, which they use occasionally to purchase latest farm equipment etc. But unlike the Maxists and their kin who depended on political ideology, these communes maintain their internal order based on close family ties and religious convictions and thus will by definition always remain small.

Re:244?

Exactly. All China is doing is sharing amongst themselves!

Well...

Records are there to be broken.

From as Bad as Piracy is in China

I think every single legitimate sale could be considered a victory.

Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China

I think every single legitimate sale could be considered a victory.

From Microsoft's perspective. From the user's perspective it can be considered a loss.

Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China

Hell, at this rate they might even top the 3,628 copies of XP sold in China so far.

Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China

I'm in China, and I got sick of the pain of endless wipe/reinstall cycles with pirate windows XP. I actually called up the local rep and ordered a genuine copy of Win XP Pro. They we, so to say, ASTONISHED that someone would want a boxed retail copy. Had to special order it - took almost a week to arrive. I'd say 99%+ of Windows installs in China are pirate. Even local OEMS do it. Once it runs out of time, the normal proceedure is wipe/reinstall. Not to good for my business. But I have everyone using Macs. A rarity indeed in China.

Unfortunately

It seems all 244 copies were sold to Microsoft's Beijing quality testing center.

Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China

I think when you only manage to sell 244 copies in China you have to admit one of three things:

a) Nobody really cares to buy your product
b) Your products are far over priced
c) Most everyone is successfully pirating your product, therefor please justify the burden of product activation (including such features as limited hardware changes) you place on your legitimate, paying customers?

We-Dont-Buy-Vista~~yes, we cant affort it

I'm a Chinese in China with a computer experience of 14 years(since 386 with dos 3.3), let me say some reasons i knew about. Vista is too expensive. 300 dollar(ultimate edition) means 2200 RMB. Many people buy a whole PC priced less than 3000 RMB here in China. Individuals won't pay anything 'software' of which price is higher than 100 rmb(14USD). Yes, if microsoft can make a geniune copy less than 100RMB, i believe everyone in China will consider it. It would be going to be a shame not to own a genuine one. But for a product now priced more than half of my computer and can be bought, copied and downloaded everywhere, I definitly going to save some money. Owning computer is no longer a luxury in China since most computer parts are manufactured here(including almost every major brand). Everyone is going to have computer at various price. Also rich people won't think of owning a genuine copy a prestige. Long ago their taste switched to cars and houses. Those worst poors dont want computer at all but food and a place to live. If ask me why there were only 244 retail sold, I'd say microsoft knew this and they dont care. More over, i doubt some microsoft dudes leaked some vista copys on purpose. How can you explain that up-to-date, fully-automatic and one-click vista activator published by some vista fan forum? it must be with assitance of a microsoft insider. The activator make every copy working exactly as a geniune one, with one click and well-documented instructions and a support forum.. Also the news covering this 244 sales is misleading people. That number was the sales of one online software store(8848 Sofeware Store in Beijing) in two weeks. So , there was just one store. i believe the total sales in China was far higher than 244.

Not to worry

There are 8,576,336 users already.

Another Embarrassing Figure

The other embarrassing figure Windows failed to release was that they have 243 employees in China--revealing that the only other copy is unaccounted for but, curiously enough, has been verified as 'genuine' by the WGA website five billion times.

Things working against them.

Well, they only have a few small factors working against them.
1: Less performance than XP.
2: Lots of bugs.
3: Perceived lack of need to upgrade.
4: The fact that china is the piracy capital of the world.
5: Windows vista costs more than two dozen weeks wages for the average worker, so its expensive even to the rich.

Re:Things working against them.

This difference between the rich and the poor in China is staggering. I know people from China, and they say the rich people are very rich. They drive around in expensive cars, and send their kids to Canadian schools who charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. These children also have their own expensive cars. Even if there is only %0.01 rich people (it's probably much higher), that's still 100000 people. If you ask me, they aren't doing too well.

Re:Things working against them.

The problem isn't necessarily the money. It's the culture and attitude toward IP in the US. I know a bunch of rich kids in the US and most of them have never bought a DVD in their life. They download all their software, movies, etc.

Re:I dispute #5

In China there are millions of people making enough money to afford a legit copy of Vista.

Mayhaps. But very few of those earn that kind of money by buying trash and keeping it.

Is that a genuine Windows SKU?

If you look closely, the vertical text on the right side of the Windows box says "Windows Vista Ulimate 2007". Given that we're talking about China, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, NO.

No worries, they can spin it...

I mean, if they can make the Zune sales look like an iPod killer (e.g. "we're the #2 selling hard-drive based digital music player in the 30GB range! we pwnz0rs!!!!1!"), Microsoft is liable to be nearly orgasmic with delight in describing Vista's position as the "top selling multi-GB-sized DirectX10 inclusive DRM-based GUI-based OS" in China...

/P

Bill gates says ...

244 copies ought to be enough ....

Cost

The distribution and packaging cost should be bigger for the Chinese version. Microsoft should have terminated the development of the Simplified Chinese version of Vista.

244 Vista users?

I don't even know one Vista user here in the States. This OS has been a real flop for Microsoft. Notice they don't give stats for actual activated copies of Vista or customer sales--they only give the numbers of OEM licenses sold. They did the same with XP to inflate the numbers.

Re:244 Vista users?

I don't even know one Vista user here in the States. This OS has been a real flop for Microsoft. Notice they don't give stats for actual activated copies of Vista or customer sales--they only give the numbers of OEM licenses sold. They did the same with XP to inflate the numbers.

I know ONE vista user, and she just bought a new laptop, with vista onboard.

The only big issue thus far, other than moving menus changing age old commands like search and replace with search and mark IIRC, is the lack of all in one printer drivers. For example the hp 3055 will print, but the software suite won't install.

She presently considers downgrading to XP to be a little extreme, as it's her belief that the world is going vista and she will be SOL with XP. You or I could just plop in the system restore discs, but this is a complaint from an average user. Also, as we are talking dual core CPUs, one has to get XP-pro or tablet/mediacenter edition. Costs too damned much, or too damned hard to find.

Aside from that, there are people who like the new flashy graphics. Even I somewhat like the new alt-tab program switcher where there is a carousel of screens which actually display what each window is presently displaying. But due to CPU use I wouldn't use it.

It would have been less.

Blame that one clumsy pirate who failed to stick the disc into his drive without scratching it 243 times beforehand.

What's funny

The irony here is that the box, the CD case, the CD itself, and the hologram were all manufactured in China along with most of the Vista-compatible hardware there is in the world.

And the point is?

Besides the fact that this is yet another slashvertisement, I'm not quite sure what the point of the article is...

Due to the overwhelming piracy in China, whatever genuine # came out would seem pathetic. Anyone have the stats on "genuine" DVD sales in China?

Source?

Oddly, the only references in the "story" (TFA) are a circular reference back to site itself and an unintelligible link to a story in Japanese. I see nothing that substantiates the claim of 244 copies sold.

Really poor submission ...

So.

That's probably how many they would have sold in the USA by now, if OEMs weren't putting it on machines.

Where I work, people are scratching it off their new machines and installing XP.

China: open source paradise

This is not a good thing, people.

Isn't this the same slashdot that celebrates mass piracy? We all know that the chinese don't buy software, music, or movies and for some bizarre reason everyone on slashdot celebrates it. They are taking money from us-- they are blatantly robbing our largest industries. This isn't bringing us any closer to the magical open source commune you people envision for the future, it's only bringing us closer to poverty.

What do you think the US's role is in the world market? How many of you work in steel, ammonia, or aerospace?

I don't suppose any of you work in software, which depends on sales- possibly web industries that depend on paying customers who aren't buying bootleg products- maybe even the financial industry, which is adversely affected by the lack of revenue our media firms and software companies see out of China.

Stop being fanboys and start thinking like we're competing in a world market and our jobs are not secure.

I suppose you'd all like to see the market shift to an open source model, where all the code is written in east europe and china where its cheaper, and those of us who once wrote software here are then waiting tables for the executives and managers who were smart enough to outsource all their R&D and engineering as soon as possible.

Selling software, entertainment products, and media in China is really the best outcome for our middle class- it doesn't only benefit a few fatcat moguls, like most of you have fooled yourself into thinking.

I'm surprised it's that many

China has been pretty frank about not giving a crap about piracy.

Who are the 244 morons who actually paid?

Piracy is fun

When I lived in Beijing, my g/f needed Windows reinstalled on her comp but didn't have a CD. We went to a local market in Chao Yang district and bought a copy of XP for 8 yuan ($1). They have boxes of cd's in shrinkwrap...Autocad, Photoshop, Flash, whatever you need. And if you buy a bunch you can bargain for a discount. Don't even get me started on DVD's... Combine that with the fact that beer is cheaper than water over there and you can see I obviously had a good time :)

Vista is stupid to sell there

First of all, I'm willing to bet there are very few "Vista-capable" computers among the "middle class" there in the first place. Second, Windows Vista is expensive as heck for someone over there -- it'd be like buying a car I reckon. Third, pirated copies are available for $1. That's one dollar!

What kind of IDIOT would you have to be to pay for a "genuine" Vista in China when you can buy a "non-genuine" one for a dollar?!

Marketing it in China was a huge waste of money. But whatever, Microsoft has money to burn.

OEM's are MS's saving grace

If it weren't for OEM software being installed on machines before the sale, MS would have gone under already. I think it's likely that while pirate copies are hurting sales, most of the people buying pirated copies wouldn't have shelled out for the real thing. Even if Vista's copy protection had been 100% bulletproof, sales would still be dismally low. XP is a fairly solid operating system, and Vista is failing to bring anything new to the table. The desire to upgrade simply isn't there.

Export licences?

Could this be due to limitations under US Law, specificially the Commerce [doc.gov]Control List or State Dept ITAR [state.gov]rules?

Many people don't know, but the US exerts complete juristication and control over exports. I would have thought MS-Vista falls under the "publicly available" software exemption, but this wouldn't cover ITAR rules on munitions (incl encryption).

I won't even install my LEGIT copy, for free

I 'won' a free copy of vista ultimate for attending a MS installfest in mtn view (at the MS campus, one sunday afternoon).

I spent the whole day there doing a test upgrade of my xp box to vista. quite a few things didn't work for me.

the deal was that we give MS some feedback on the install and we get, in return, a retail boxed ultimate copy.

they kept their promise and I got mine in the mail.

however, I don't plan to install mine. not sure what I'll do with it, but even for free - I'm not willing to install the drm-posing-as-an-os on my system.

I do use XP for photo work (and xp makes a GREAT platform for vnc-client, btw) but xp will be the last MS o/s that I ever install.

when people refuse to install legit copies FOR FREE, then you know you have a PR problem on your hands..

Marketing 101: Success vs Failure by the #s

Microsoft should be able to sell what it wants, at the price it wants with whatever DRM and restrictions like its ET = "Phone Home" stuff and whatever else it wants, because it is a free market out there.

But CUSTOMERS always determine success or failure in various markets. With the 244 MS China sales reps, IT guys & crackers having bought a copy of VISTA to jump start sales, the rest of China has given MS's VISTA a slamdown.

3rd world sales of VISTA are worse than the OS cost as other things cost more:
1. New Hardware needed in maybe 80%+ of users
2. New or patched applications & MS Office needed
3. Maybe your new PC goes into slowdown if you bought one with a pirated version of VISTA

How much is an OS worth & why is a stand-alone VISTA copy so high?

I seem to recall I bought my family pack of OSX 10.4 for around $150 for use on up to 5 computers, and there was no choice in which of 6 versions of OSX I would buy, and I did not fear that all sorts of things would crash when I upgraded from 10.3 (and they didn't).

Just my opinion, but I think Ballmer goes by 2010. I understand that pricing as high as the market will bear works in Tiffanys, but OS's are COMMODITIES. Ballmer is trying to moosh the numbers so MS stock price goes up or at least holds. Customers vote with their feet and their wallets, and Ballmer will never be able to spin customer demand.

Out and out ignorance

Microsoft apparently doesn't know much about China. Since during their ad campaign for Vista they cast a giant ad on the Jin Mao tower. Everybody knows the Jin Mao tower is haunted by a headless horseman. So naturally the reason why Vista isn't selling is because people think the headless horseman in the Jin Mao tower is trying to trick people into installing inferior software on their computer.

It's not just piracy

A bunch of American and European companies have locations in China (either factory or research) with many people working there and they don't have an interest in pirating a Windows CD, just because of the possible risk of infected images or litigation in their home countries.

You could say it was due to pirating if their projected sales are down by 1-5%, you can't say it if you didn't sell ANYTHING AT ALL. Let's be serious, 250 copies is not really a pirating problem (especially with the draconian DRM/WGA and the buggy/infected patches), it's a resale problem, people don't want your product, not even Chinese Americans that adore Microsoft or first adopters that want the latest and greatest. People don't even want it when they BUY a computer and get Vista for FREE (Vista OEM price = XP OEM price) and don't tell me that a country with over a billion people didn't buy more than 250 computers the last 2 weeks, even though a lot of people are poorer than their westerner counterparts, there are a bunch of companies, a bunch of gadget freaks (more than the US I think) as well as a bunch of filthy rich (richer than you and me). China is not the 3rd world country, the west wants us to believe. Sure it's a poorer country, more mining accidents and their government sucks, but it may be a 2nd world (like us during and right after the industrial revolution or the world wars), but I wouldn't call it 3rd world (as in massive amounts of people dying of malnutrition and no hospitals or massive internal wars).

XP out sells Vista

I work for the UK's largest online retailer of PC components.

OEM XP is out selling OEM Vista by about 9:1.

Retail XP is out selling Retail Vista by about 40:1.

That's weird...

I think I saw a single street vendor on Qianmen Lu sell about 200 genuine Vista DVDs in less than an hour.

Aha!

Now Micro$oft knows that there are exactly 244 bootleg-software manufacturers in China!

Well, 243, plus that one idiot who actually bought a copy to use...

Whoever posted the story must be an idiot, unless.

Whoever posted the original thread must be an idiot, unless he just tries to misinform the public for whatever personal agenda. According to the "joyo", an Amazon partner in China, they have cleared their Vista stock by 2/13/2007. Although they didn't reveal the numbers, Joyo started selling 10 versions of Vista with price range from $100 to $500 since 1/30/2007. Joyo is the largest retailer of Vista in China according to Microsoft. I also dug out the 244's origin. It was Vista sold by a much smaller (and little know) shop "8848" from 1/19/2007 to 2/2/2007. This is an perfect example of fabrication and distortion in its worst. The number is the result of a marketing research by a firm ZDC, with no relation to MS. Shame on you Slashdot!

Re:Piracy is theft

That's right! Especially if you were never going to purchase it for any reason whatsoever anyway. They still have the cd to sell that you were never going to buy. Flame me, I dare you!

Re:Piracy is theft

Let's none of us deny that software piracy is illegal and to some degree... wrong (in that you're doing something to something someone created that they don't want done to it, of course, that doesn't say anything about just _how_ wrong it is... i would bet, not that wrong ultimately). However, poor sales of the software in China alone does not say anything about causation, simply correlation.

My point is this. Sure, piracy exists, but we cant blame poor software sales on piracy _alone_. After all, if we were to do that, people might start doing crazy things like complaining that people wont buy crappy music because of internet downloads, when the reality is that some music just sucks. If we had awesome Vista sales in the US, and poor sales in China, and you considered Chinese market factors on the process and built an actual model to analyze it, then maybe, maybe you could say something conclusive about piracy. You however, are just making a bigoted guess, at best.

Re:Piracy is theft

Let's hear the Slashdot crowd claim, once again, how software piracy is not really theft

Well, you asked for it, so here we go. Software piracy is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which may or may not be fraud. The purchaser of the software, having agreed to the conditions of the sale, breeches his/her contract when he/she copies that software and gives it away. As such, most cases of non-commercial software piracy should remain civil matters between the buyer and seller of the software. It is only when the pirate sells the illegitimate software as legitimate software, or otherwise commits piracy for profit should criminal charges come into play.

That is why software piracy is not theft, and should not be a crime. As for piracy being unethical, I can see real world cases where it perfectly ethical. If you buy a software product, and your disc breaks and the company will not supply a replacement, I would not find it immoral to supply you with a copy of mine. But when we start creating bullshit words like "intellectual property" so that we can make software piracy look more like theft or that only pirates would ever need to circumvent a protection device, is where we start to point the ethic finger back at the software industry and tell them to look in the mirror for a change.

Ok

It's not theft, it is copyright infringement.

To different things, as recognized by our founding fathers.

Copyright is a sticky issue. While I believe in copyright, what exists right now is wrong, abusive, and exactly the reason many founding fathers want to excplicitly not allow copyright. Which is why we have a compromise of letting congress i.e. the people, determine what it shuold be.

Personally, automatic copyright for 14 years, then a 12 time 14 years extension for 10,000 dollars would be fair.

Please note I did not say the copyright violations are right.

"...nd how it does not deprive the software-maker of anything of value."

The only people I ever read or hear saying that are people comlaining about the "anti-copyright crowd".

Even then, not all copyright violation hurt software makers.
For example, software from a defunct company, or software that is no longer for sale in any version.

For example: I am trying to get a copy of Carcossonne that was released a few years ago. You can no longer buy it from the people that made it, and it was released on CD only in Germany.
It's not in any software store, it is not available through ebay to the US, and it is not sold directly through the site anyumore. Which would be my perfered method.
My next step is to contact the company and see if they can help. If not, I may try to just get a copy of it. Which, from the makers point of view, no different then buying it from a used software store. Which I would do, except it isn't available.

AS for MS, I don't believe them. They have been putting pressure on China to change their copyright laws(which they believe would magically change the culture) and they have been known to lie to get their way.