On Thursday, software giant Microsoft threw light on some more details on Windows Vista’s financial performance, adding that it is apparently meeting and surpassing market expectations.
Whilst making a presentation at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting at its Redmond headquarters, Kevin Turner, chief operating officer for Microsoft stated that since its worldwide public launch on January 30th, the company has already shipped 60 million copies of the operating system to PC makers, retailers and customers.
[Submitted by Imran Asad]
In the first month of the launch itself, Microsoft claimed to have shipped 20 million copies of Vista and as many as 40 million copies of Vista in the first 100 days.
“By our math, we eclipsed the entire installed base of Apple in the first five weeks that this product [Vista] shipped,†Turner said.
As per Turner, driven by the progress in developing countries such as Russia and Brazil, the Windows Vista OS will be operating on approximately 1 billion PC within the next 1 year’s time.
He further added that 68% of users purchased steeper premium versions of Windows last year, a 16% increase from the year before. That was led by purchases of premium consumer versions of Windows, which were up 19%.
According to Turner, the main reason as to why Vista was performing better than the XP OS was thanks to the former’s security and reliability.
Further on, Microsoft also anticipates dollar sales of XP and Vista to grow slightly slower next year, at a rate of between 9-10%.
But Microsoft did point out that the fact that the Redmond company has shipped 60 M copies does not imply that 60 M individual users are using the OS. But all the same, a few analysts do maintain that the two figures may not actually be that far off.
Moreover, the 60 M figure does not take into account the 42 million PCs covered on the day of the announcement under corporate volume licenses agreements for Windows.
Though these numbers may seem great, for a fact Microsoft has not had a very smooth journey with the Windows Vista OS. It took over five years to arrive. In fact the Microsoft had also been criticized by business for the Vista delay until it was finally released in November 2006 for businesses and January this year for consumers. And even before its general availability, a study conducted went on to conclude that ironically half of Corporate America’s PCs could not run the OS. And this was followed by quite a few other issues. Sometime ago too the company was caught in the “Windows Vista Capable†branding spat.
