40M Vista Licenses in 100 Days

Gary writes "In the first 100 days since its launch in Jan 30 Windows Vista has sold an astounding 40 million licenses. Bill Gates gives the credit to accelerating consumer shift to digital lifestyles which has made it the fastest selling operating system in history. Surprisingly the more expensive premium editions accounted for 78 percent of Vista sales. With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8 weeks to beat Mac users, 4 days to exceed Mac sales and 3 days to exceed Linux desktop users."

Hmm..

In other news... China sells 40 million of it's OWN copies.

"beat Mac users" ???

Possible replies are gushing forth...

• Beat them at what? Solitaire?
• Beat them with what? A stick!?
• ... beat Mac users at number of hosted spambots in 8 seconds.

Re:"beat Mac users" ???

You are about to place a queen of spades on top of a king of hearts. Cancel or Allow?

Re:Hmm..

Can't RTFA (since appear to be /.'d), but I just wonder, how many of these licenses were sold to Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc...
And since there are no more XP, well...

Re:Hmm..

Can't RTFA (since appear to be /.'d), but I just wonder, how many of these licenses were sold to Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc... And since there are no more XP, well...

Apparently, they sell even more licenses than Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu together. Wohoo! Amazing.

Maybe it's just the longest overdue OS release ever. "...4 days to exceed Mac sales and 3 days to exceed Linux desktop users", more like 6 years and 4 or 3 days.

Re:Hmm..

How many are being used? Isn't that the real question. How many of those people got the new PC and put XP on it? How many loaded linux or BSD? Not every computer shipped with Windows runs that version of Windows. IT people might have bought a site license to run Vista Business but bought Vista home, etc. Everybody get out your jump to conclusions board.

Selling != using

So the claim that Vista users will out pace Mac or Linux users so quickly is not true. Its not even possible to get an accurate number on that. I didn't RTFA, but I also wonder what Mac OS sales figures they are using. Are they just comparing 10.4 sales to vista? Are they comparing Mac hardware sales? I upgraded my laptop to 10.4. Is that in there? Not all my Macs even run Mac OS. I have one running OpenBSD exclusively.

How are they comparing Linux users? Is it redhat and suse sales? If so, that's a very small percentage of total linux users.

Re:XO

If naive doesn't apply to children I doubt it applies to anyone. Kids _become_ the most computer savvy people after spending time with them. The idea they will be more knowledgeable than computer scientists is so laughable as to be endearing. On the other hand, it is one of the better trolls.

Re:Hmm..

The Linux fanbase has no qualms claiming downloading=using

Really? The only Linux number I have seen recently were for Ubuntu, and that was based on the number of people downloading updates through the automated system.

those who use Linux a large number have it installed on secondary partitions as they want to keep their primary windows platform while playing around with Linux to get geek cred

No. The dual booters I have met use Linux as their primary OS and use Windows for games.

it never was, never was meant to be and never will be a mass market operating system used by the naive users

I know several naive users who prefer it to Windows.

Re:Hmm..

I also work for a college, albeit on the Unix side.

Last I recall, we had Software Assurance or whatever they're calling their upgrade program. Long story short, we can install Vista on all 6000 of our machines. We don't actually run it on more than 100 right now, but we technically are licensed to do it, by virtue of our site license that we pay MS for every year.

I'm quite sure that they look at our licensing tier, say "They can go up to 10K machines on this license, so we'll mark them down as 10K Vista licenses sold."

It's easy as anything to play the numbers game, depending on what premises you accept.

ALL of them--the story summary is a troll

Microsoft doesn't reveal consumer and retail sales of Windows licenses, only license sales to OEMs. They did the same for Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't want people to know that retail sales are down 60% from Windows XP and that Vista demand is so low, Dell has reinstated XP as an option on its machines.

As for "beating" Mac numbers, Britney Spears also sells more CDs in a year than Mozart concerts do. If that's the kind of victory that Microsoft fanboys want to trumpet, go ahead. Meanwhile, Vista is a flop.

P.S. Activation numbers

I forgot to mention this. Microsoft refuses to give out the figures for Vista's WGA activation. That would give a good estimate of the actual number of users running Vista. I know Microsoft enthusiasts are absolutely desperate to spin any positive press for the Vista debacle, but it just doesn't fly with people anymore.

Dell is contributing here...

How many of those licenses are due to people buying a new Dell and deciding to go with Vista, rather than purchasing XP retail?

I mean, yes, they are forcing it on us as best they can, and there are still enough people who don't like it that Dell is giving us XP again. I really don't see a better time for Dell to ship Ubuntu, either. My recommendation to many people is: "Vista is likely to piss you off at least as much as Ubuntu is while you're learning it, and while people are rushing to release Vista-compatible versions of everything. If you're so determined to put yourself through the pain of a new OS, you may as well install Ubuntu (or Kubuntu), so that at least the next time around, you won't be paying for an upgrade."

In other other news...

... 95% of the world's lemmings have jumped off a cliff.

Re:Hmm..

In other news... China sells 40 million of it's OWN copies.

Correction:

In other news... China sells 40 million of it's OWN copy.

Re:Hmm..

I don't even use a spelling or grammar checker anymore. If I have any doubt, just post it on /. and wait for 100 anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death. It's great to have a community of Asperberger's victims at my disposal.

Re:Hmm..

Asperberger's It's spelled Asperger's! Learn to spell! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH

Re:Hmm..

Asperberger's It's spelled Asperger's! Learn to spell! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH

It's pronounced "ass burger," isn't it?

Re:Hmm..

> I don't even use a spelling or grammar checker anymore. If I have any
> doubt, just post it on /. and wait for 100 anal-retentive, pedantic
> grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death. It's great to have a community
> of Asperberger's victims at my disposal.
>
That would be "If I have any doubt, *I* just post it on /. and wait for
100 anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death." Unless
you really mean to offer other people the advice of posting things to /.
in case *you* have any doubt, which would be a bit strange.

/Your local anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazi

Re:Hmm..

I was never quite sure if "anal-retentive" was hyphenated or not.

Instead of a hyphen, wouldn't a colon be more appropriate?

hmm

Ah, looks like another game of 'defer the revenues from a more successful quarter to a less successful quarter'. Didn't yall get in trouble w/the SEC for doing that?

Where did they get these numbers?

I'm betting they included "free upgrade to vista" offers for copies of XP sold for the year prior to vista. But how many of these people have actually claimed their free upgrade copy?

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

I know a couple that have. However most of them have subsequently given up on Vista and reinstalled XP.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

Ok, so let's assume the split is something like 39,995,000 OEM sales and 5,000 retail. So what?

The world's largest OEM, Dell, has begun selling PCs with Windows XP again and will soon offer PCs with Ubuntu pre-loaded. These separate, but related incidents come on the heals of complaints from Dell customers who wanted a choice after they had tried Windows Vista and discovered it sucks.

40 million licenses != 40 million Vista users.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

That hardly matters from Microsoft's perspective. They've booked the revenue. They get the income. That's the goal, remember. Tearing the numbers apart in throes of pedantic ecstasy is just masturbation.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

Except if those OS's are not running on actual PC's and generating sales of secondary software then Microsoft finally loses it's network affect benefits of being ubiquous.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

I'm betting they included "free upgrade to vista" offers for copies of XP sold for the year prior to vista.

Nope. They cannot state those as current-period sales, and for Gates to publically announce that they were would be grounds for FTC action. I'm sure he cleared the statement through Legal, so I'd be willing to bet those aren't included.

If he had said that 40 million licenses were issued, that would be a different story... but he said sold.

A Clarification

Hey,
The "free" upgrades cannot be stated as sales. The discount coupons sold can be stated as sales this year -- and they were. Total deferred licensing (Vista + Office 2007) was around 1.64 Bn for Qtr 1 2007.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

Nope. They cannot state those as current-period sales, and for Gates to publically announce that they were would be grounds for FTC action. I'm sure he cleared the statement through Legal, so I'd be willing to bet those aren't included.

I strongly doubt whether Gates needs to check with the folks in Legal when the folks in Accounting will do just fine.

And since neither you nor I works in that area, we'll have to defer to someone more qualified or at least informed to comment as to how the sales were booked and the rationale used. In the interim, lets enjoy the wild speculation, trusting in the notion that there's a grain of truth to all rumours.

Re:Where did they get these numbers?

AS there were 238 Million PCs sold last year, we could take a rough calculation of 20M PCs sold per month, thus in the first ~= 4 months Vista shipped -20M copies, including pre-existing vouchers !!

Indeed

If you read the TFA carefully, you notice that they speak about "Vista license sold".
Not "Vista License currently used to run the OS" or "machine currently running Vista in the wild".

Almost any of my non-Linux-using friends that I know to have recently changed their computer, got it with Vista pre-installed by default and had to either go through the "can I swap it for a Windows XP if I send you the media ?" procedure with the machine manufacturer or dig out one of their one "Win XP Pirate edition".

They are counted as "sold License". They don't run Vista any more.
So my interpretation of the data is :

40 * 10^6: Number of time Microsoft *sold Vista* (pre-installed on some machine at a time when the manufacturer didn't propose alternate OS)
4 : Number of users currently running Vista (and still waiting for their legal WinXP install media that they claimed from the manufacturer to come in their mailboxes).

150 million computers sold per year

something like 150 million computers are sold every year. (it was 130million in 2004). And so 100 days is 27% of a year. 27% of 150 million is 41 million computers. Presumably 95% of these are Windows and sold with vista either pre-installed or a coupon for vista (which MS would count in their sold total).

So not only are the stats utterly unsuprising, but when you consider that the biggest surges in computer sales happen in the vicinity of christmass then 40 million copies of vista is severley lagging what one would have expected just from new computer sales alone.

It's interesting to note that the large fraction of pro-edition sales. This suggests IT department purchases or pro-user purchases. These are the early adopter crowd. Logically, this early adopter crowd is a one time surge.

Thus the the 40 million is under-following the general trend in New PC sales. Infact there's negative growth since something is offsetting the expected plus up in the early purchase rate one expected from early adopters and christmass sales. The logical conlcusions is twofold
1) corporate fleets are not adopting it or are otherwise delaying new computer purchases.
2) essentially NO ONE besides the early adopters experts is buying this to replace XP on existing machines.

Since Vista is supposedly harder to pirate than XP it wold seem that this can't be blamed on piracy either.

in short 40M/100 days is absysmal.

Still doesn't say

who these licenses are being sold to. If half of them were sold to only two OEMs, its not saying much really. If even half of them were bought off the shelf at Best Buy or other stores, that would say something. So, exactly who is buying these licenses?

Re:Still doesn't say

There's another catch. Since Vista's inception, my company has bought several hundred Dell boxes(with Vista preloaded). However, we don't use Vista, we still use XP because we don't trust Vista with our network...

Re:Still doesn't say

The catch is the fact that the more expensive premium editions are accounting for 78 percent of their sales. The people who don't want Vista aren't buying the premium editions.

Re:Still doesn't say

The lowest edition I could get with my new laptop was Home Premium.

Re:Still doesn't say

Exactly, in the Netherlands at least only the lowliest computers are sold with basic by default. All the others run Premium. Hell, even a 800 euro laptop comes with Premium nowadays. so the high percentage of Premium sales says nothing at all. Actually, it might be that the Basic version disappears from desktops altogether, because nobody might buy these computers without Premium. It's more that Basic is for loosers, and all the other guys get Premium, than that Premium is the odd one out.

Roman Numerals?

40M Vista Licenses in 100 Days

Hmmm, my Roman Numerals are a bit rusty but 40 * 1000 = 40,000 licenses!

That's way more than I'd ever expect! Congratulations, Gates! You must be proud that your employees each own a copy!

Waiting for it...

I hate Microsoft as much as the next man, but I'll be entertained to see how some Slashdotters twist this into being "bad for Microsoft" or something. Every other day I see some comment like "The end is here for Microsoft" or "It's all over for MS" or some such nonsense. Let's see:

1) Record profits in the last year
2) Fastest-selling OS in history

It's only getting better for them, isn't it? We need another way to fight them...

Re:Waiting for it...

Record-setting profits are easy when the profit margin is 80%+, and selling quickly is easy when each new PC sold has a copy of your product bundled with it.

That removes things like production costs and consumer choice from the equation. :-)

We already fought them in court, and won. It's hard to gain much ground, however, when some elements of the government seems to be in bed with the company which is violating anti-trust laws...

Article

Since the original link seems to have been /.'ed, here is the Reuters story [reuters.com] on it.

So what this clearly implies...

There are 170212.766 Vista users for each Microsoft patent being violated by free software.

Fastest?

"Fastest-selling OS in history"

That wouldn't have anything to do with having more computers in the world NOW versus, you know, any other point in history?

In other news, the world's human population is the highest it's ever been in history.

400,000/day? Not really

With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8 weeks to beat Mac users, 4 days to exceed Mac sales and 3 days to exceed Linux desktop users."

Sorry, sales/day is not a constant. MS sold 20 million Vista licenses in the first 30 days (according to MS). 70 days to sell another 20 million...

Two data points are not enough to extrapolate a curve, but I'd guess that sales as a function of time is a logarithmic curve (based on early adopters) plus a near-constant (based on replacement cycles).

Can we have some more useful numbers?

How many of these were bulk licensing deals with companies that basically let them run whatever OS was the latest?
How many of these businesses actually have moved their production systems onto vista?

How many of these were OEMs?
How many of those which were OEM have been reinstalled with XP (pirate or otherwise)

How many were free upgrade with XP systems?
How many of those used the upgrade and are still running vista now?

Its difficult to buy a PC without it!

For all practical purposes you must buy a Wondows OS when you by a PC.
(Geeks can manage it but try getting a cool VIAO or ACER which isnt preloaded with Vista!)

The interesting statistics would be how may PCs sold with Vista have been back-graded to XP?

Judging by the various blogs etc. this would seem to be the only way to get your shiny
new box to run as fast as the old one.
Google "Vista The long goodbye" Results 1 - 10 of about 907,000

So thats 5% of Vista users hacked off about just one of the Vista bugs enough to blog or cry for help.

Give it until next year

The true tale of Vista will be in about 18 months (from release). I know for myself, I wouldn't touch Vista until the early adopters suffer the bugs inherent in any new MS release and MS fixes them, Ditto for all the missing drivers for hardware. After this time next year Vista will have ripened and be ready for prime time and we'll get an idea of what it can really do that makes a it worthwhile upgrade over XP. If it doesn't have any advantages by then, penetration will be largely limited to newly bought PC's and MS will have to do a rethink. If it does improve and become useful, then MS will continue on as it always has, and while some may not like that, remember that no one changes a successful behaviour. For them, it has been successful, like it or not.

Be interesting to find out...

...just how many copies of AOL are in circulation. Surely, the fact that it's included with just about every new PC proves AOL is a stellar success.

Pulling an Epstein?

When the beatles first record was released, their manager reportedly bought 10,000 copies so that it would make it into the charts. I wonder how many copies of Vista were purchased by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Typical Microsoft stretch marketing

Trying to make a failed product launch look like a success.

Fortunately, there are articles [theinquirer.net] that take a more rational view of how many copies of Vista are actually being sold.

The headline is simple, 40 million copies sold. Wow, we rox0rz! This is twice as fast as the XP adoption rate. What he didn't mention is that sales of PCs have more than doubled since XP came out. Silly Vole, no statistical cookie. The problem? Well, PCs sell at about 60 million units a quarter, and everyone we talk to expects sales of around 240-245 million units in 2007. Vista went on sale at the end of November for corporate customers, and one would expect a fair chunk of sales there from pent-up demand.

MS Marketing spin at it again

Vista has sold an astounding 40 million licenses...

Accept or Deny?

Less Vista licenses than PCs sold.

Someone elsewhere pointed out that since Vista was released there have been approximately 50 million PCs sold. So, selling 40 million Vista licenses isn't that great.

Licenses do not equate to users

Remember, every PC sold by most of the major vendors include a license (regardless of the OS eventually used on it)... What would be more important is the numbers of unique activations.... Where's that number? 4,000? 40,000? 400,000? Let's see that number (with the info to back it up)... Otherwise this is just optimistic marketing drivel.

Our little story

Two months ago I was working as a consultant with a Durable Medical Equipement company. It's a small business, 7 employees and about a 800k in sales a year. Their computer system and software was still running on DOS. (at least server end) and as they were going for new accredidation they realized the old software just wasn't going to make the requirements. The software company was still in business and we chatted with their support team a couple times and they expressly told us "THIS SOFTWARE WILL NOT WORK WITH VISTA". This was back in January. They liked dealing with Dell. I'm a Mac guy myself, but in these kind of situations, one is stuck with the option of windows...or windows. They were a small business and about half their sales is through public aid. Anyone dealing with the government knows that you'll get your money....eventually. They were waiting for a payment to come in before they had the extra cash to purchase the server, two new workstations, and software. In total it was about $15,000. ($10,000 of that being the software). They didn't get their check until March. By then Dell wasn't selling anything but Vista on their machines and the software vendor hated dealing with HP (so much so that they simply don't.) I don't do service contracts. I simply provide advice acting more like a CTO to small businesses helping them sort through the FUD and answer any questions...and tell them when the sales people are full of *#$&#. Personally I told them to go with DELL because they were the only ones I knew would still be around in five years to offer support. But what was the install options on the new workstations? Well Vista and um....vista. So we ended up buying the entire system through Gateway. Not my first choice for several reasons, but they still offered PC's with XP pre-installed. Install went without a hitch and we sent the old box out to the company's lab to recover all 20 years worth of records and it was the first time I have ever done a major system port without loosing a single record. Frankly that was one of the smoothest transitions on that end. But still Dell was doing their same old game of "Only the latest Operating system from MS." and that cost them a sale. I got a lot of calls from businesses asking, "Do I need Vista?" With the chances that some of their software won't run, my answer was (and still is) no. Stick with XP at least for another year. You don't buy an MS OS until Service Pack 1 is released. It's just like my true mac head friends that want to preorder the iPhone today or purchased an AppleTV. There is no way in hell I'm buying the first generation of anything Apple. (That being said, I've been using a Mac Mini with LCD TV since it has a DVI plug in for almost a year now). I've been cut enough times, that I stay behind the bleeding edge these days.

Here, take this:

[

]

It's some whitespace you can use in your next post. No, don't thank me, I've got plenty.

Corporate OEM purchases

I bet a lot of those licenses went to corporate OEM purchases.

We brought a shit load of Dell computers that came with Vista licenses. Microsoft got their money from Dell. All those purchases are on the Microsoft accounting books.

Then we imaged the new PCs with the the corporate XP license.

Number of Vista purchases: lots
Number of computers running Vista: 0
Ability to buy a Dell system for corporate use without any OS license: pipe dream

Hm... lies, dammed lies and statistics

Okay,

Of the 40m licences how many are licences which came with a new PC?

Of the ones supplied with a new PC to firms how many firms left Vista on rather than reverting to XP?

Of the remainder how many still have an MS OS on them (we recently had about 10 PC's for a client supplied with vista, they left with Linux on them - I know we could have got them barebones pc's but they wanted a named (not dell) brand)?

Re:I'm confused...

There is no Vista ? ;-)

(I stopped believing in spoons long ago)

Both.

It's a mixture of both. This is a press release by marketing to try to bolster stock prices. So when they mean licenses sold, that doesn't mean the same thing as copies purchased. It with all likelihood refers to the number of licenses they have sold to Dell and other major PC vendors, all of the free upgrade licenses from XP, all of the copies they sold to retailers (which the retailer may or may not be having luck selling), etc...

Vista isn't the failure that /. anti-MS pundits would have you believe, but it is a long way from the success that Microsoft's marketing department would have you believe.

-Rick

What about our own dogfood?

Few MS products look good out of the gate. Then they do what we do: they listen to their users and improve their product incrementally. Same thing FOSS devs do - but we don't like to admit that because MS are evil and their products don't live up to our standards. However, they make a shit pile doing it. A company with 20 something billion in reserves and no debt is not going to go down anytime soon folks and its foolish to underestimate a juggernaut with their resources. I'm not a fanboi and I could care less how well they are doing and its silly on our part to fixate on how poorly we would like to believe they are doing. It makes us look foolish. Let's fixate on improving our own dogfood instead of listening to our own make believe FUD. Let's not stoop to their level.

Re:I'm confused...

I should go and take some screenshots of articles and posts saying how Vista is a failure. The same darn thing happened with XP: "OMG! no drivers! Games don't work! its so slow! doesn't work on my 266 mhz celeron!", and now the Slashdot crowd spits out quite a bit that Microsoft is a failure -except- for XP, which is semi-acceptable.

Now we see with Vista? Same damn thing. "OMG no drivers, omg games, omg its slow, omg omg omg failure, I'll never upgrade from the previous version!"

Same. Damn. Thing. Hell, XP was worse: my 1 year old (at the time) lap-top had a hard time with XP, and I had paid a fortune for it. My 3 years old budget lap-top runs Vista just fine.

The only thing that can rival Microsoft's FUD, is the fud coming from thousands of geeks banded together :)

Re:I'm confused...

I don't take issue with the system's speed or games. I have a problem with the protected content path, and other DRM technologies integrated even further into the operating system than any part of WMP11 was integrated into XP. If I'm going to buy or use an operating system, I expect it to be made with me (the consumer) in mind, not the interests big businesses have to limit my access and restrict my fair use rights. I recently switched to a Macbook Pro because of Vista, and I must say, I'm finding that it increases my productivity quite drastically.

Re:I'm confused...

Except what do you gain from Vista?
Most people moved from Windows 98 to XP. They gained a much more secure system in that move and moved to the proven NT kernel from the 95/98/ME codebase.
The move to Vista? I see little gain but eye candy. DirectX 10 may be a big deal and the move from GDI could be important to some people but unlike the move from 98 to XP there is little to gain.
XP to Vista is about as good of a move as from 98 to ME.

Vista is such a small improvement that I am seeing wide spread interest in Linux for the first time. The FAA and NASA are both not jumping onto Vista.

Re:I'm confused...

What am I supposed to believe: facts, or Slashdot FUD?

The facts. And the facts are the Microsoft has been deferring the count of "Vista Upgrade Certificates" until the first quarter of 2007. So a large portion of the 40 million is from Vista licenses that Microsoft has been selling for the last year.

It's also important to note that there are no figures on how many of those upgrade certificates have been cashed in for an actual copy of Vista. Which means that the number of installed Vista Desktops could be a mere fraction of the 40 million unit number that Microsoft is providing.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain

Re:I'm confused...

There is no such thing as slashdot group think. There are a wide variety of opinions expressed on this site, that's why I keep coming back. I think that the only reason anyone believes that stupid "group think" meme is because they believe that only someone brainwashed by group think could ever possibly disagree with them.

Get over it. People who disagree with you are not weak willed idiots infected by some "group think" mental virus.