Gates reveals Vista is far less popular than Microsoft would like
Taking the stage for his last time at CES in Las Vegas, Bill Gates claimed that Vista had shipped 100 million copies since it released last year. In doing so, he unintentionally revealed that Vista is less popular than Microsoft would like it to be.
Using the 100 million figure, that shows only 39% of PC shipments in 2007 included Windows Vista. The rest, shipped with Windows XP. Microsoft’s worst competitor against Vista is its own, older operating system, Windows XP.
In fact, Vista barely managed to outperform first year sales of Windows XP which isn’t that great considering the PC market has doubled since 2001.
When Windows XP released in 2001 it sold 89 million copies in its first year, according to ITnews, meaning Vista sold a little more than 10% more copies in its first year than XP.
All things being equal (but that’s not necessarily the case) Windows XP garnered 67% of the market in its first year and Vista got only 39% of the market in its first year. This is probably partially due to the fact that many corporate users have no intention of deploying Vista before the final version of SP1 is released, if they deploy it at all. Many would prefer to wait for Windows 7 considering the possibility of a hardware upgrade being required for that operating system as well.
In fact, 30% of corporate users are never planning to upgrade to Vista.
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January 8th, 2008
Corporations didn’t deploy XP during the first year either. It will not deploy 7 over the first year. Normally, you don’t see quick adoption because of the cost, testing and pilot projects, Corporate PC’s are usually on a 36 month depreciation/replacement schedule so the hardware is too slow. Email, Office
and Power Point are all that’s needed.