Vista adoption going up but revenues going down for Microsoft
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Windows Vista is costing Microsoft both time and money. That money is in the form of losses due to lawsuits (mostly court fees so far) and lost revenues compared to the same time last year. During the first three months of 2008, revenues are down for the company by 24% when compared with the same period in 2007.
Vista may now have sold 140 million licenses but the whole picture is somewhat less clear. Just because adoption is going up, doesn’t mean that revenues are.
Speculation is running rampant that this is due to the unwillingness of businesses to adopt Vista and to a lesser extent, consumers. According to Computer World, at least one analyst thinks that Microosoft is having trouble convincing users of Vista’s value.
Allan Krans, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc said,
"More than a year has passed since the rollout of Vista to both the business and consumer markets, and experiencing revenue declines so early in the product life cycle is not a positive sign."
When compared with a similar period during Windows XP rollout there was a drop of less than half of 1%. Microsoft says the drop is due to the fact that it accounted for the free Vista upgrades that were given out as part of the 2006 holiday upgrade program because Vista wasn’t ready at that time but the decline was only 2%.
Needless to say Vista continues to experience problems and Microsoft has done little to correct its checkered past. It’s not quite as bad as ME and while it’s not a close second, it does come in behind Windows ME in second place as the second worst operating system ever produced by Microsoft.
Maybe it’s like what Coca-Cola did with New Coke to compete with Pepsi. New Coke was a dismal failure and was pulled from the market almost overnight, Microsoft isn’t doing quite the same thing with Vista but Windows 7 will be along in no time flat (one to one and a half years) to sweep away the mess that Vista has created.
Somewhere, somehow, Microsoft knows Vista is a failure. Things might have been different had the company provided hardware vendors with better support so drivers would have been provided on time to customers and if the 2006 holiday release had been made, well, things would have been a lot different. But to really shake things up, that whole Vista Capable and Premium Ready logo marketing would just have to get canned; only systems capable of running Aero Glass should have had Vista installed and Basic should have never been made.
There, Microsoft, doesn’t anyone in your company have an IQ above "let’s make a sale no matter what the cost" - I bet it’s already cost more than if the problems had just been avoided in the first place.
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April 26th, 2008
The so called “adoption” figure does not take in account of …..
Returned computers, installing XP over Vista, dual booting with Vista and Linux, enterprises and subscription license availability (even though corporate is less than 10%), free giveaways, free upgrades for Vista “capable” computers Dec 2006 - Jan 2007, free Vista for Beta testors, and lastly forcing only Vista in the mainstream brick and mortar.
Anyone can take widget A out of 80% of the market and replace it with widget B. And then “claim” the widget B is a great seller. That is spinning the truth, and in some circles it “could” be construed as fraud and deception. Though I digress.
Anyone can fudge the figures, but no one can fudge the facts. Vista is in trouble and so is MSFT. The greatest Spin Meister still has to look themselves in the mirror in the morning and the reflection is not pretty.
April 26th, 2008
every version of vista is a “home” version.