Image by techedlive via Flickr
Reports are all in that the initial launch of Windows 7 has been a huge
success for Microsoft – which is good, because the general reviews of
Windows 7, and my own beta testing of the product showed that it was
much better than Vista. But when you see something that is selling at a
243% clip over Vista’s roll out and something that directly results in a 49% bump in PC sales as people skip Vista, that is a lot of pain to undo.
Vista was the Microsoft OS that everyone loved to hate, much like
Windows ME, Vista besides being late, really had a lot of issues, and
still does. Windows 7 addresses many of the issues that annoyed people,
made computers act fat and bloated, or otherwise made it impossible to
sit down and go to work, you had to go through a very long boot cycle.
Lawsuits aside, and Steve Ballmer’s comments on Vista’s one big mistake, or the many other mistakes that people are pointing out on their own web sites over the years, Vista was
the OS to skip. This means that Windows 7 had to perform, and had to
live up to its hype, even with the cool party packs that Microsoft was
shipping out before Windows 7 launch date.
Another surprise: High volumes of boxed-product sales.
Windows 7, when sold alone, saw sales that were 234 percent higher than
Vista’s own boxed-product sales in the first days of its launch. NPD
projects sales for Windows 7 to have been 82 percent higher on a
revenue basis. Baker figures that’s due to a healthy population of PCs
on the market that can run Windows 7, making it less necessary to
purchase combined system-and-OS packages. One of the major features of
Windows 7 is its smaller footprint compared to Vista. So if your PC can
run Vista, it will definitely run Windows 7. Source: Internet News
In all good news for Microsoft – but what keeps this one
interesting is that there has been a lack of generally bad press since
launch. Everyone is talking highly of Windows 7, and one has to wonder
if that is also part of the reason for the huge bump in sales. Vista
got such a negative reception that many decided to skip it, and keep
XP. One of the reasons that XP stuck around for much longer than
Microsoft wanted it to, bad press, and a generally poor replacement.
Microsoft might have hit this one and hit it out of the ball park,
but just about anything is better than Vista. And there is still no
reason for me to give up my shiny apple laptop yet, but maybe, just
maybe, I’ll forgo my Apple planned upgrade and buy another windows
computer. But only after work upgrades and I have a chance to use it at
work. I am going to be very stingy with money, and not just simply
accept the trade press reports this time, I’ll need a compelling reason
to leave apple, and go back to Microsoft.
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launch, Windows 7 sales are triple that of Vista’s first week
(infoworld.com) - Buying a new computer
in the age of Windows 7 (lockergnome.com) - Windows 7 Still
Vulnerable to Viruses – Durr, Really? (wired.com) - Windows
7 sales leave Microsoft coffers unstuffed (theregister.co.uk)
(Cross-posted @IT Toolbox)
