Microsoft has adjusted its 2008 fiscal year sales forecast for its operating systems by increasing XP by nearly 50% and decreasing Vista by about 8 percent. The adjustment came after the release of Microsoft’s fourth quarter earnings.

Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell told analysts that “we fine-tuned the Vista/XP mix for next year”.

Earlier, the Vista and XP fiscal year 2008 sales forecast has been set to 85/15 split. With the new adjustments, it has now become 78/22 split.

Microsoft, however, failed to elaborate the reasons for the adjustments. The company claims that Vista still enjoys a very high sales expectation ratio over XP and that the adjustments will still generate more or less the same revenue.

While it is true that Vista still has a very high sales expectation ratio compared to XP, the adjustments seem to indicate that XP is still more popular than what Microsoft expected after the release of Vista .

Many analysts believed that Vista is far superior to its predecessor. However, the market experienced shows that customers still aren’t convinced.

Most large companies are still in the process of testing Vista or waiting for the release of Vista ’s SP1. Feedbacks of Vista ’s early adopters were not very encouraging as most experienced issues of hardware or software incompatibilities. Some even moved back to XP.

This situation even pressed Dell to change its Windows Vista-only policy.

In April, Dell dumped its Windows Vista-only policy by adding Windows XP again as an option for four models of its Inspiron notebooks and two models of its Dimension desktop PCs despite Microsoft earlier announcement that it would stop sales of Windows XP to resellers and retail market after January 2008.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 12:57 pm under Microsoft.  Print This Post

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