Windows Vista is doing well…in India that is
By Justin Montgomery
Out of the estimated 180 million Vista licenses sold worldwide, over two million alone have come out of India. More surprising, a majority of those licenses are for home edition in the consumer segment over enterprise.
According to PC World, since the launch of Vista in India, large computer manufacturers such as HCL, HP, Lenovo, Sahara, Wipro and Zenith have been shipping Vista-loaded PCs. They understand from these OEM partners that there has been an encouraging uptake of Vista- loaded computers in the Home User segment. The largest aspect of Vista that has been the most popular among Indian consumers is the entertainment options Vista provides over older version of Windows.
Microsoft plans to go to 260 towns and cities this year covering over 10,000 partners in India during its current Vista push. "Additionally, to help educate customers, we have strong programs to train and certify partner sales and technical personnel- one such initiative is the ‘Microsoft Foundation Series’ that was launched on July 2007. This program focuses on building awareness on Microsoft Platform through Video Conferencing and runs across 25 cities every quarter. The prime objective of this program is to help new partners joining the Microsoft Partner eco-system and new people joining existing partners. We have touched over 1500+ Sales & technical professionals, and we will continue this journey in enabling the Partner ecosystem", said Prasanna Meduri, Director, Windows Client, Microsoft India.
Like much of the world, the push for Vista in India is more or less tightly related to the fact that XP is hard to find these days, and consumers are more or less forced to use Vista. The inherently skews the usage numbers in India to favor Vista greatly- when in reality, consumers would most likely prefer to stick with XP if they could. Also, if someone is starting a new project or a company, they go directly to Vista, thereby increasing its sales, and skewing the usage numbers that much further.
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October 6th, 2008
Why would you think Vista is going to be more popular in the Enterprise than the consumer line?
Corporate acceptance always lags. Lot’s of Win2000 still running in businesses.
October 7th, 2008
I’m missing essential data in this article. 2 million out of 180 million licences of Vista are sold in India. But India holds about 20% of the world population! Judging from those figures (1/5), 2 out of 180 (1/90) sounds rediculously low.
What’s missing, is the number of PC users in India. Or at least a percentage of Vista-users worldwide and in India specifically.