http://techiqmag.com/2007/03/29/memo-to-microsoft-10-ways-to-jump-s...

Ha ha, Microsoft ME, uh, Vista, all over again!! ^_^

The question are "sales" or "giveaways". Because the "free" Vista upgrades are used in sales numbers.
For most companies is waste of resources to jump on the Vista wagon get.

Simply because:
No service pack1 released yet
No large scales production tests done yet (read stress tests)
No driver support (aka. zero fallback to W2k drivers)
Increased hardware costs (large scale RAM upgrades etc.)
Broken application support (upgraded software are required, or new programs must be brought to replace old ones)
Vista interface is pointless and unneeded in a Citrix Client
Large scale purcase of new licences for new programs are required.
Clearcut separation of user and administrator accounts is not there in Vista
There can be security risks in Vista that is not published yet.
DRM build into the OS (which can be "refurbished" as Microsoft wishes)
Eula is changed for Vista, which states ownership is by Microsoft and you only brought usage rights (Xp eula states ownership is held by consumer)

Benefits for company:
new shiny for users
adaptive Tcp/ip stack (ok, this is quite nice)
selective roaming profile (which can done by hand in W2k3 distributed file structure also)
NAP / CAP protocols from Cisco & Microsoft (available as an upgrade to Xp later)

Go figure why people are Anti-DRM and anti-Vista

It really is a waste of effort trying to argue with these brain dead lemmings that keep on parroting the "Vista is crap" FUD.
They are all waiting for the "tone" at TR to shift to a "Hey Vista is actually really good" before they all follow like an avalanche.

Yep, my friend bought Vista standard or some such for $50 when buying some peripherals. I guess people have to buy Vista because it is so much harder to pirate, eh matey? I wonder if they are going to use that stat to 'prove' that they were/are losing revenue because of rampant piracy of their previous software releases.?. 20 million sales in one month doesn't leave much market for pirates. I hope they don't starve.

people in 2007 are idiots, we know this, why keep bringing evidence of this?

One of the key points in the Vista development program early on was the decision to drop the vast amounts of legacy code required for backwards compatibility with everything(and avoid howls of"Its so bloated")and move to a new more efficient code base.
Why is it so hard to understand that some software wont run on it?
Many software companies have just hoped MS would do all the work for them...take Saitek for example.Months after Vista's release and they still havent managed to come up with the programming software to enable their joysticks to work correctly...even tho its not much more than enabling the ability to re map keyboard strokes.Their answer to the thousands of customers who bought joysticks that now wont work..."We are working on it"...it will be soon blah blah blah.Just substitute their name for plenty of other companies who just folded and walked away when it became obvious that they would have to actually spend some money and time to adapt to Vista.
Imagine designing a new,clean and efficient Hydrogen car then getting slammed by everyone because it wont run on gasoline...

Why is everyone so negative?

By their numbers they had 20 million copies sold of Vista in one month. This compares with ~17 million of XP in two months. One of the complaints seems to be the market has grown since then. Yes it has, but has it grown at nearly 20% per year over the last 5 years so that the increased sales can be strictly attributed to market growth? I some how doubt that, but I don't have the numbers.

The other complaint is that Vista being pre-installed doesn't count. It does! They are comparing it to XP, the actual numbers are pretty meaningless for that comparison. Unless you're going to say something has changed since then and corporations were swarming to use XP when it was released but are being more reluctant with Vista, then the comaprison is valid.

Looking at the socket poll I know I'm not alone. Both my main boxes currently are nForce2 chipset based (Abit NF7-S Ver.2 to be precise). Thanks to Nvidia's refusal to release ANY chipset drivers for motherboards which were still current production a scant 20 months ago, I can safely ignore Vista. I am told the early RC candidates included basic drivers. As it stands drivers included with Vista will make basic sound 'sorta work' (forget Soundstream), there are no IDE drivers (that's OK the Nvidia drivers were buggy for some), there are Sil Image SATA drivers that can be made to sorta work, but the basic GART driver, while it lets you get video running will do nothing but crash during gaming or anything else complex.

I have seen no evidence that anyone has been able to hack/slipstream the RC drivers into the shipping product and they were also, I'm told, limited in functionality.

Yes, this is 99% Nvidia's fault, in this day and age we can't expect any mb maker to craft their own drivers and it has made me vow to never buy ANY Nvidia product again.. ever. MS has the clout to lean on these companies and in the past they did make sure that all reasonable current hardware got supported. This time they don't seem to care and the sheer greed of these companies is making them dare to see just how much of their existing base they can 'obsolete' without a severe backlash.

We build lots of boxes every year, none will EVER contain anything made by Nvidia ever again...

Hey, guys, here's your answer

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/stacking_vista_license...

Microsoft is counting in the "20 million" in sales the millions of upgrade coupons sold with XP machines between October 2006 and the official Vista rollout of January 2007.

We all forgot about those "free Vista upgrade coupons" sold with all those Toshibas, HPs, Dells, etc. - but Microsoft didn't. Since Vista's "official" date of sale is where they start counting their numbers from - not before - any of those "coupons" redeemed all get rolled into the February sales period.

XP never had a pre-release "upgrade coupon" offer, so the figures are completely apples and oranges...or whatever Microsoft would like us to believe them to be.

Nice piece to cut through the marketing bs with:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-vistas-twofold-sales-...

Vista is actually selling slower than Windows XP when a proportion is taken to adjust the size of the market. 51 million PCs were sold in 2002, compared to a projected 96 million PCs this year:

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/104587604/article.pl

This should put things in perspective a bit (see quote from Gartner analyst):

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700ap_microsoft_vista_sales...

with virutally minimal to no driver support for even 2006 hardware, its the best OS out there according to the idiots at PC magazine!

Why does everyone say Vista gets a month + 3 days compared to Windows XP's 2 months, when XP was released on the 25th? Seems to me Windows XP only has a few days on Vista. Unless they are counting Nov and Dec.

While the sales look good, the overall functionality is sorta poor, from what ive heard.

For me windows xp was no reason to uograde my computer from windows 98, at least untill the service pack was released.

These numbers mean nothing if they include copies shipped pre-installed on systems, which they surely do. A great many of those systems go to businesses where they are promptly wiped by IT and replaced with a standard image. And I'm betting not too many of those images involve Vista.

20 million apples vs 17 million oranges and people are trying to draw conclusions. It's just marketing.

It's pretty clear to everyone that they are using the raw numbers to make things look good, but the actual case is the opposite.
20 million is only 17.6 percent more than 17 million. I'd bet money than the actual number of PCs purchased in that time period is much much greater than 17.6% compared to when Windows XP was released.

Anyone know were I could find statistics for the number of PCs sold by monthf for the last few years?

Vista's numbers don't include business sales in December/January.

Remember, XP debuted for both business and consumers on the same day.

These numbers are amazing.

Two things:

1. If PC sales grew at 10% per year, then you'd expect OS sales today to be 1.1^6 = 1.77 times what they were 6 years ago. 17*1.77 = 30. 30/2 = 15. So, by this crude calculation, Vista sales are higher by 33%. That sounds pretty good.

Except for....

2. When XP was introduced back in 2001, it was on the heels of Windows 2000 having come out about a year earlier. The company that I'm working for is *still* running win2k (never bothered upgrading to XP). The Vista analogy would have been if Vista Business were released one year and Vista Home the next year. In other words, comparing Vista to XP is nowhere near a clean comparison.

I think the right comparison here is to look at marketshare over the next few years. If MS prevents competitors from gaining marketshare, then Vista will be a success. If Mac and/or Linux marketshare goes up, then Vista is a failure.

Is that faster by the percentage of PCs running the OS or faster by the number of sales? Edit: Um yeah, so what if I asked the same question everyone else has.

It's 20 million versus 17 million, but what is the difference in customer base? I'd be more interested to know what percentage of PC users acquired Vista more so than just the number 20 million. Alone that number doesn't mean too much. It's like Geico saying 4 million people switched to them. What they don't say is that 3.8 million went elsewhere.

sales of computers are probably + too..

that said, im on vista here so some people must be buying.