Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales in FY08 243
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
It may be good for Microsoft to have to start answering some awkward questions.
Re:A couple reasons for this (Score:2, Insightful)
Vista is a big change (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft Says (Score:4, Insightful)
If people dont want Vista then I cant see their sales being very high.
Re:Vista Sucks... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A couple reasons for this (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A couple reasons for this (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing New Here (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
If only... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A couple reasons for this (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at it this way: even after spending millions and millions of dollars on marketing, and then
Re:Yup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So basically (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.