Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales in FY08

Rude Awakening wrote with a PC World article, saying that XP sales will actually be higher next year than they were in 2007. Despite Vista's release, Microsoft admitted this week that it expects the previous version of its operating system to make up a larger percentage of its OS sales in 2008. "According to Liddell, Microsoft will generate the same revenue, more or less, under the new Vista vs. XP numbers, although there might be some slight differences because Vista sales have tended to involve more of the higher-priced versions, dubbed premium by the company, than has XP. The financial forecast didn't spell out that directly, however. The only clue was a US$120 million difference in what Microsoft pegged as the 'undelivered elements' it assigned to unearned income for the coming year."

Re:A couple reasons for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way, this is the sort of thing that will make shareholders start to ask questions. If the new product isn't selling as well as the old one, what will that do to long term growth? They'll want answers and they'll want to know what Microsofts strategy is for dealing with the problem. Some of the more attentive ones may question the millions of dollars spent on producing a product Microsoft can't sell.

It may be good for Microsoft to have to start answering some awkward questions.

Re:A couple reasons for this

[fastest fascist]

Your first point doesn't really hold water. What were these people supposedly buying XP "while they can" running before? I don't see Linux people suddenly deciding they need XP because of Vista's arrival, and everyone else will have been running windows on PCs anyway, be it XP or 2000, and the 2000 crowd tend to be the type who made a conscious choice to stick to that OS instead of XP. I guess if someone somewhere was running Windows 95 or something on a PC capable of running XP, they might buy XP while they still can.

Vista is a big change

[LaughingCoder]

XP sales will thrive until businesses switch over, which will take some time. And the more saavy businesses will wait for service pack one before switching. This is not surprising - we saw a similar phenomena back when XP came out. Here is an article from as recent as 2005 talking about the slow switchover from 98/2000 to XP http://www.betanews.com/article/Windows_XP_Adoptio n_Rates_Slow/1118943913 [betanews.com]

I am in the process of learning Vista right now. My first impressions are that there are some things to like (lots of problem diagnosis tools, configuration history tracking, network mapping, etc) and some things that make you scratch your head (I have yet to figure out how to coerce Vista to allow my backup service to start each time I boot - I always have to "give permission". I know I can turn off User Access Control entirely, but that seems a bit draconian and not really "in the spirit" of Vista).

Re:A couple reasons for this

[evilbessie]

Unless of course you are stupid enough (seriously why are they still shipping Core Solo machines running vista, because that's not a good experience of Vista) to buy a VAIO which ONLY have Vista drivers, damn stupid Sony, yet another reason not to give them money.

Re:Microsoft Says

[cheater512]

Um...XP sales increasing AFTER Vista is released either means that the sale of computers has jumped exponentially or people dont want Vista.

If people dont want Vista then I cant see their sales being very high.

Re:Vista Sucks...

[Conor Turton]

XP may have had more holes in it but it just WORKED. I can't say the same for Vista at all.

Oh how short a memory you have. For a start SLOW NETWORK SHARES BROWSING which is still a major issue on XP. XP when it first came out had a whole slew of issues and SP1 did a massive job of clearing them up. In fact, it can only really be argued that XP fully matured with SP2. Drivers were less of a problem because XP was based on Win2k, so you could always try Win2k drivers, but for those of us who've been around a while, we can remember the problems with Win2k driver model caused in the early stages.

The same is happening with Vista. Remember that like Win2k, Vista uses a different driver model from what came before. Drivers will improve, service packs will address the issues. 3 years from now, you'll have forgotten about the problems existing.

Re:A couple reasons for this

[aborchers]

Exactly. The corporate world is always miles behind. My company is just still malingering on 2K on a lot of boxes, just now getting to XP. Big companies are not known for leaping forward into new and unproven technologies, especially when most of the improvement is just user eye-candy.

Re:A couple reasons for this

[jellomizer]

Even without the slashdot tolling but from ordinary non-computer people. People are having a lot of problems with Vista. The Technical People say it is slow. But the non-technical people are having a hell of a time getting their old software, hardware to work. Microsoft when making Vista was way to ambitious at the start of the project (Longhorn Days) so we are getting pieces that were designed to work with more advanced other sections that hasn't been added... Say for example the Mythical WinFS Which allows for a lot of faster reading, So many components were probably designed with that in mind and used some extra disk activity to do work because with WinFS it was faster, but then they dropped WinFS from the OS so now we have code that is doing more disk reads then it would do otherwise thus bog the system down.

Besides proLinux and proMac Feeling. Windows XP is now actually a decent OS that is stable. Lately I have been seeing more Macs semitransparent Black Screen of death then Windows Blue Screens of death (Although to be fair it is often because I am using Parallels to boot windows on my Mac). The fact that it hasent had a major upgrade in 6 years now actually makes it a pretty fast OS which modern software supports.
Much like how in the early 90s how X-Windows had a bad name because of all the resources it use, and windows 3.1 was much lighter... Then Ten and a half years later X-Windows is the lightweight.

Re:A couple reasons for this

[NeoTron]

I, for one, run Linux practically exclusively on my machines. However, my sister-in-law, for example, wanted to purchase a new laptop. Now, the particular model she wanted came with Vista, but I advised her to get the shop to install XP instead, for numerous reasons (the incompatibility with a lot of older programs, drivers, etc. (I'm too lazy to list ALL the reasons right now)), so she has followed my advice and is a happy person. The point of this post? Vista, in my opinion anyway, is rather like Windows ME of the past - a bit of an abortion from Microsoft - they have quite obviously released Vista FAR too early - it's an unfinished product, rushed out of the factory, because it perceived its competitor's products (Linux-based, OSX-based for example) being released with certain innovations which it wanted to claim for itself as its own innovations, and now because of that is paying the price of that rush. People percieve Vista to be what it is - a rushed out Operating System with many bugs, failed claims, and as a - to be extremely kind - beta quality product at the very most.

Re:A couple reasons for this

[GLowder]

Or, you do like my wife and I did, we've changed over to Mac OS X. We still have a few commercial apps that are currently "windows only". I bought each of us a new XP license in order to install them on Parallels. XP is ok for the time being for a few apps, but I'm just not happy letting Vista in the house.

Nothing New Here

[Prototerm]

I'm a consultant and get to talk with IT folks in various organizations. When I ask their opinion of Vista, it's like they just sucked on a lemon. XP is bad enough -- a lot of their computers are still running 2000 -- but Vista is not an option. There are two reasons: hardware drivers that they've heard are either buggy or unavailable for existing equipment, and the inability of existing computers to run it. Not to mention the high cost of new computers capable of running it. Everyone has gotten used to being able to buy cheap, name-brand machines for the organization. Then there's the concern about mixing Vista with XP in the organization. Supporting the users on Vista is no slam-dunk.

It will take a while for these organizations to start buying into the whole Vista thing, and will only happen once the older computers and peripherals are retired. Until then, and only then, XP will remain the preferred operating system over Vista. This shouldn't be earth-shaking news, since a lot of old companies are still using older versions of windows (I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a few Windows 98 and NT4 installations out there), and are only now considering a migration to XP. Microsoft justs needs to have a little patience. Vista will start gaining traction with these organizations in 2009.

Re:Goddamn mongoloid editards

[joseph449008]

Mongoloid is an offensive and outdated term. It was replaced by Down's syndrome. I'm being serious.

If only...

[elsJake]

So people paid a lot of money on hardware to run Vista but would never do that to run say ...GNU/Linux ? I mean think about it , if everybody that upgraded for Vista put their money in a jar , said I'll buy this GFX card and this and that. Those hardware manufacturers would have actually worked on a driver , merged in the kernel and everybody had a 100% fully functional GNU/Linux PC for only the cost of the hardware , whereas for Vista they would have also paid for the operating system itself. But wait , what about games you say ? People were paying for the hardware to run DirectX 10 games,not older ones , hence game developers would have had to develop these new games , what if they developed them under OpenGL instead ? (and worked with the guys creating DirectX 10 GFX cards to create something open for Linux instead).

Re:A couple reasons for this

[LehiNephi]

Keep in mind, however, that the 4:1 ratio is a number released by Microsoft. Considering the amount of effort and money they are expending to promote Vista, I find even this number hard to believe. Remember the vouchers Microsoft gave out at the end of last year? The ones they gave out before Christmas because Vista wouldn't be released by then? They counted every one of those as a sale of Vista, despite the fact that very few of those vouchers have been or will be redeemed. They also count every machine shipped with Vista today, regardless of its eventual fate. That means that all the computers sold to big companies (that receive these computers and immediately image them to XP or 2000 or Linux) count as sales of Vista.

Look at it this way: even after spending millions and millions of dollars on marketing, and then ...ah... "massaging" the statistics, the best they could come up with was still less than what they expected.

Re:Yup

[Winckle]

Here is a diagram to explain this situation. -=Joke=- 0 /|\ You As you can see, the joke is passing rapidly over your head.

Re:So basically

[Jerry]

"All the real people you know"? How many is that? One, two?

No, VISTA is NOT a "casualty" of bad reviews, because most pre-release and just released reviews had been good. They've been good because they were bought off. How quickly you seem to have forgotten, for example, the free laptop fiasco which saw several journalists and bloggers receiving free Ferreira laptops in exchange for writing good reviews about VISTA. One has to wonder what "gifts" Microsoft sycophants like Rob Enderle and Laura Didio got for their continual gushing over VISTA, save for an occasional "faint praise" article, and to spread FUD about Mac and Linux?

The REAL reasons why VISTA is doing so poorly is because of word of mouth/keyboard by actual Windows users who have real world experiences to relate in talkbacks and independent blogs. For example: A "real people" and long time Windows fanboi, owner of a popular Windows blog site, and beta tester of VISTA, decided to compare it with Mac by forcing himself to run Mac for one month. After one month he surprised his readership by announcing that he decided to abandon VISTA and Windows, and make the Mac OS X his OS!

Another example: Our IT department got a DELL laptop with Enterprise VISTA installed in order to test it to see if they wanted to begin rolling it out to our 400+ workstations. The laptop was DELL 620 dual core with 2GB of RAM and an 80 GB HD. In the first three months several of the IT guys played with it a couple hours a day. Even with that low usage rate VISTA crashed so often and so bad that they had to reinstall it THREE TIMES. The video would randomly go in and out of HiRes, if they could get it into HiRes at all. Sometimes the DVD would work but mostly it wouldn't. DRM was butting in all the time, refusing to play legal media files , etc. It had even locked up on the first boot up following one fresh reinstall. They decided to use their XP volume license and replace VISTA with XP on all new DELL computers coming into the department. In my experience it was a wise choice. And now, this posting is but one of many more that continually flood talkbacks on various forums on a daily basis.

Despite the flood of bad news from REAL users, George Ou and Ed Bott and some of their colleagues at ZDNet, continue to report glowing experiences, sans problems, with VISTA. If that says anything, it says you have to be a computer expert to setup and run VISTA without experiencing problems. But, they might not be reporting the whole truth. It reminds me of the "uptime wars" several years ago when users of Win95/98 were claiming uptimes of 1 or 2 years in order to match uptimes claimed by users running Linux servers. (I had a SUSE server in my office run 630 days before it was shut down.) The wars came to a sudden end when Microsoft announced the 49.7 day clock bug. That bug hung any Win95/98 box which managed to reach that uptime, forcing a reboot. The fact that the Win95/98 fanboies reported uptimes far in excess of 49.7 days meant that they were lying about experiencing uptimes in excess of 49.7 days. If they had a Win95/98 box reach 49.7 days they learned about the bug or may have known of the bug but lied anyway because of their Windows zealotry.

Will VISTA eventually succeed? Probably. Money talks, and it talks best in a corrupt society, especially one as corrupt as our is. Microsoft has $60 Billion to spend to make VISTA "good enough", to continue the PR barrage and anti-Linux/Mac FUD campaign, to continue buying off politicians to get additional laws passed favorable to their proprietary products, ballot-stuffing Standards committee votes, if they can't just buy their proprietary format into being a "Standard", and reigning in DELL and other OEM slaves who wondered off the Microsoft plantation.

Meanwhile, in other news ...

[PPH]

... Ford announces continued strong sales of the Edsel.

Requisite bad car analogy: The incorporation of numerous 'advances' in automotive technology have fueled a healthy market for older models.

Re:Upgrade Train is Out of Steam.

[dedazo]

You know you're pretty much down to scraping the bottom of that barrel when you find that those stupid images actually make a point of some sort... and then you actually use them to prop up your "M$ is dying" dribble.

I mean, those aren't even well done, never mind funny or even worth looking at. Do you hang out at 4chan? What am I saying, at least the /b/ doodles tend to be well done and actually funny. "Pathetically stupid" is a good way to describe these.

soon they will be missing Wall Street's, then it's all over for them

1999 called, he wants his doom predictions back. "XP is not selling, everyone is sticking with 2000, Microsoft will go bankrupt soon" and so on and so forth.