Bill Gates - "100 Million Vista users"

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heatlesssun

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He made that statement in his keynote at CES last night. I'm sure that some will argue this number, but it would seem that Vista's uptake is faster than most are stating.
 
if you order home pc's right now they have vista...



alot of computers get sold over christmas and the course of a year... i'm not too suprised
 
And how many of those users have Vista on the back burner and are using Windows XP. I personally have 4 licenses of Vista and waiting for a 5th and 3 are installed and activated. I can see where he could pull those out of the air from.
 
Jasonx82 said:
Does this mean sold to "end users" or "retailers/distributers"? :confused:
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end users.

Look at the Vista polls on this very forum - Sometimes upwards of 500 people vote and usually ~80% are "Very satisfied" with Vista and keep it as their daily driver.
 
The absolutely only reason Vista is spreading at all is that it's a forced default on new systems. Otherwise it's adoption rate would be extremely slow since nobody really needs it.
 
Doesn't matter to MS if it's installed or sold. As long as it's sold they get the money and the investors will be happy.
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
they missed the extra 1 million who downloaded it. :rolleyes:
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ROFLMAO

To true, a friend is still using his trail install, shouldn't have made it so you could update the 30 day trial install (day 274).

I'm happy with Vista.
 
Related...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080106-despite-problems-consumers-choosing-vista-over-xp.html

I think this is one of the more interesting bits...
There's been a bit of a tussle over these numbers. PC World's Techlog recently published an article stating that by the end of its first year, Windows XP accounted for 36 percent of that site's users, while Vista accounts for only 14 percent today. Based on this evidence, the Techlog author concludes that Vista's adoption rate is much lower than XP's.

While Bott makes no statements regarding the current total number of XP users vs. the number of Vista users, he notes that while PC World's numbers are undoubtedly accurate, they reflect only the OS usage of people who visited PC World, not the entire consumer market. Regardless of what the current split is between XP and Vista, other evidence suggests that Vista is gaining market share over XP at an appreciable clip.
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If Gates is trying to make a point about how "successful" and "popular" Vista is, the sales numbers don't mean much.

The company I work for buys Dells preloaded with Vista and then downgrades them to XP. This is common practice in the business world, so far. Buy downgradable Vista licenses so you can upgrade in the future. But only something like 3% of businesses have moved to Vista.

So yeah, Microsoft gets the money whether Vista is actually installed or not -- but they're going to have a bit of a problem down the road if no one is actually adopting the OS.
 
I still take that Vista is meerly a stepping stone and not meant to be something full-blown. They're waiting for Windows 7.
 
PenaltyShot said:
If Gates is trying to make a point about how "successful" and "popular" Vista is, the sales numbers don't mean much.

The company I work for buys Dells preloaded with Vista and then downgrades them to XP. This is common practice in the business world, so far. Buy downgradable Vista licenses so you can upgrade in the future. But only something like 3% of businesses have moved to Vista.

So yeah, Microsoft gets the money whether Vista is actually installed or not -- but they're going to have a bit of a problem down the road if no one is actually adopting the OS.
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That's never been unusual though. How many years did it take XP to become the standard in the corporate world? I know of companies that finally upraded to XP from win2k only a year ago.

On the otherhand. 99% of all consumers won't go through the effort to downgrade to XP on a new Pc like a company would do.
 
PenaltyShot said:
If Gates is trying to make a point about how "successful" and "popular" Vista is, the sales numbers don't mean much.

The company I work for buys Dells preloaded with Vista and then downgrades them to XP. This is common practice in the business world, so far. Buy downgradable Vista licenses so you can upgrade in the future. But only something like 3% of businesses have moved to Vista.

So yeah, Microsoft gets the money whether Vista is actually installed or not -- but they're going to have a bit of a problem down the road if no one is actually adopting the OS.
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That statement is retarded, the office I work at still has Windows 2000 as their primary OS on every computer, reason for not upgrading, DONT NEED TO. If the majority of computers are based on Windows XP, then why upgrade when you got a sure thing already? XP didn't take off any faster than Vista.
 
RangerSVT said:
That statement is retarded, the office I work at still has Windows 2000 as their primary OS on every computer, reason for not upgrading, DONT NEED TO. If the majority of computers are based on Windows XP, then why upgrade when you got a sure thing already? XP didn't take off any faster than Vista.
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I would very much love to upgrade all of our company computers to Vista, but sadly Primavera Project Manager P5 does not work on 32/64 bit Vista nor 64bit XP. So we have to stay with XP Pro until we migrate to Primavera P6. We're working on that right now though. Soon I hope!
 
After my initial concerns and getting everything working properly on my buddies computer we bought a guide to Vista book, and honestly I love it. I am going to Vista as soon as I get moved and money gets straight, just bought a house so things are a little screwy.

Things seem to operate so much more smoothly and overall usage is a snap!!
 
JSpecGC8 said:
After my initial concerns and getting everything working properly on my buddies computer we bought a guide to Vista book, and honestly I love it. I am going to Vista as soon as I get moved and money gets straight, just bought a house so things are a little screwy.

Things seem to operate so much more smoothly and overall usage is a snap!!
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This has been my experience, and I'm always left scratching my head when people complain about Vista's performance or some other issue.

Vista doesn't really have a very compeling feature to make the upgrade a must have most folks. However, I love the dektop search, and know that I'm used to it, XP isn't so cool. Yeah, there are desktop search add ons for XP, but they just don't work as well as Vista's, at least not to me.

XP was great,but when SP3 gets released, its going to be down hill from there. There'll be less and less support for it over time, though that will many years no doubt.

Vista FTW!:D
 
JSpecGC8 said:
After my initial concerns and getting everything working properly on my buddies computer we bought a guide to Vista book, and honestly I love it. I am going to Vista as soon as I get moved and money gets straight, just bought a house so things are a little screwy.

Things seem to operate so much more smoothly and overall usage is a snap!!
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Guide to Vista? We don't use guides. I don't at least. More fun to mess with it.
 
griffinhart said:
That's never been unusual though. How many years did it take XP to become the standard in the corporate world? I know of companies that finally upraded to XP from win2k only a year ago .
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Like I said...it isn't unusual. It's common practice in the business world.

That statement is retarded, the office I work at still has Windows 2000 as their primary OS on every computer, reason for not upgrading, DONT NEED TO. If the majority of computers are based on Windows XP, then why upgrade when you got a sure thing already? XP didn't take off any faster than Vista.
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Which of course, was exactly my point. The company sees no need to upgrade from existing operating systems (we still have both Win2000 and XP in the user base), so for new PC purchases (and new PC purchases only), the company gets Vista licenses (which cost no more to us than what an XP Pro license would have cost) and then downgrades to XP. IF and WHEN there is actually a tangible need to upgrade to Vista...well then, we already have the licenses. Sweet.
 
I can believe those numbers. My university offers Vista Business for free for Communications and Engineer majors, which is how I managed to get my copy (albeit 32-bit, but still). :D

Personally, I had already installed my copy of Vista on a separate partition since September but didn't get around to really use it until recently when I was bored and decided to play with Tweakguides' Vista Tweaking Companion. I was able to play around and familiarize myself with some of the new features of Vista and got a better understanding *why* Vista may *seem* like a resource hog, even though it really isn't. I have to admit, I'm really loving Vista and am getting close to deleting my XP partition! :eek: Vista is just really snappy in general and really is a friendlier ground for multitasking, in my opinion. Not to mention that it is really great looking too! ;)

So I can understand the slow adoption and hesitation to migrate to Vista. But I think once people really give it an honest opportunity they'll most likely come to find how much more efficient it is to work in. And with time, it'll only get better as the new Service Pack is supposed to offer enhanced performance as well! :cool:
 
RangerSVT said:
That statement is retarded, the office I work at still has Windows 2000 as their primary OS on every computer, reason for not upgrading, DONT NEED TO. If the majority of computers are based on Windows XP, then why upgrade when you got a sure thing already? XP didn't take off any faster than Vista.
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Your own post is retarded if you can't see that he's talking about downgrading not upgrading. Even if your office has w2k as primary os I seriously doubt they will downgrade from XP to w2k if they buy a new workstation. This however is what's happening commonly with Vista.

In business use there are little reasons not to use W2k over XP. Theyre both solid OSes. As what goes with Vista.. problems galore. Especially with mixed networking with the network stack messed up once again.

Vista is a failure much like Leopard. Something that will be stepped over and forgot asap.
 
According to hitslink, Windows 2000 market share is around 2.66% and dwindling rapidly. Windows XP has around 76.91% and Windows Vista is increasing at approximately 1.3% per month at this rate, currently standing at 10.48%.
 
RangerXML said:
And how many of those users have Vista on the back burner and are using Windows XP. I personally have 4 licenses of Vista and waiting for a 5th and 3 are installed and activated. I can see where he could pull those out of the air from.
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How is he pulling it out of the Air if he sold them, just because people didn't install it, or aren't using it doesn't suddenly mean they didn't sell it to you..... someone bought those license at some time, but it would be interesting to see how many of those 100mil are ones that were given away via promotions and such.
 
RangerXML said:
ROFLMAO

To true, a friend is still using his trail install, shouldn't have made it so you could update the 30 day trial install (day 274).

I'm happy with Vista.
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i don't think he was referring to trial installs......
 
One can argue with the numbers; however this is the true genius of Microsoft. There is simply no other piece of software that gets this type of distribution. Not even the great Apple or Google can do this.

There may come a time of course when desktop OS is a thing of the past, but it’s probably be a while.
 
Cyrilix said:
According to hitslink, Windows 2000 market share is around 2.66% and dwindling rapidly. Windows XP has around 76.91% and Windows Vista is increasing at approximately 1.3% per month at this rate, currently standing at 10.48%.
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http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=11

Another way of stating the exact same thing:

According to hitslink, Windows 2000 market share is around 2.66% and dwindling at -0.33% per month. Windows XP's market share is dwindling even faster at -1.33%. Windows Vista is increasing at approximately 1.3% per month, currently standing at 10.48%.

If you look at the graph (the green line) you can already see the Vista curve - it's already exponential -

Last 6 months:
+0.9%
+0.8%
+0.9%
+0.7%
+1.1%
+1.4%

Remember - these percentages are "compounded" monthly and are significant numbers.
 
doesn't add up

Gates say "100 million Vista uses"

YET vista shipped on 39% of PC's in 2007


Either gates is being spun a long one or what they class as user... class as sales (the free d/l for academia counts as a "sale" iirc) or they class sales as bulk sell to OEM's (who didn't end up re-selling them to the end user).

you don't really buy from MS, you buy from a distributor


its usual sales fluff and FUD from MS
 
Geez, the stuff you people can drag out... :)

100 million machines with Vista on them and actually being used on a daily basis worldwide? Man that's... that's not even a drop in the bucket, so it's entirely possible and more than likely is 100% accurate - in fact I'd go further and say there's even more in use. This thread has become just another opportunity for someone to point a finger at Microsoft and bash 'em, and I don't mean offer quotes to bash.org to laugh at either.
 
Vista is a fine OS, just too bad it's crippled by DRM. When I buy a $1500 pc I don't want my freedom of doing what I want to do with it to be taken from me. That's why I'll never even think of using it as a main OS. Linux does everything I need atm, and does it better.
 
I hear you, man! I try to do things like listen to my MP3s, and Microsoft makes a pop-up come up that says I should pay for my music, and refuses to play the music unless it's ina "certified" WMA format that I can't listen to on any other computer or MP3 player. I try to watch an AVI, and Microsoft says I should buy the DVDs - even for home videos!
 
It seems most are thinking he is including all SHIPPED copies, not sold, as well as all corporate licenses (used or not - corps have the option to use XP or Vista for their licenses, and most are NOT using Vista yet).

I think it's pretty much a BS answer from a guy who's a master at BS.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
I hear you, man! I try to do things like listen to my MP3s, and Microsoft makes a pop-up come up that says I should pay for my music, and refuses to play the music unless it's ina "certified" WMA format that I can't listen to on any other computer or MP3 player. I try to watch an AVI, and Microsoft says I should buy the DVDs - even for home videos!
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Dude, this simply isn't true. I've played countless movies and MP3s on my Windows systems over the years and what you described has NEVER happened. MP3s are not a protected format, Vista DRM doesn't affect them as well as any other of the myriad of non-protected formats. Please stop spreading FUD.

I believe what Gigamo was talking about was WGA, the Windows copy protection shceme. Yeah, it sucks, but what it Microsoft or any other for profit software operation supposed to do? Lower prices? We'll unless the price is zero, people will still steal it. There are probably more illegal copies of desktop Windows out there than all Linux distros combined, so yeah WGA isn't effective, but its proabably better than nothing.

For all of you that hate WGA, if you could come up with a good model that actually works from both a consumer and business economic model, you could write your ticket to wealth beyond your dreams. It's not a simple problem.
 
heatlesssun said:
Dude, this simply isn't true. I've played countless movies and MP3s on my Windows systems over the years and what you described has NEVER happened. MP3s are not a protected format, Vista DRM doesn't affect them as well as any other of the myriad of non-protected formats. Please stop spreading FUD.

I believe what Gigamo was talking about was WGA, the Windows copy protection shceme. Yeah, it sucks, but what it Microsoft or any other for profit software operation supposed to do? Lower prices? We'll unless the price is zero, people will still steal it. There are probably more illegal copies of desktop Windows out there than all Linux distros combined, so yeah WGA isn't effective, but its proabably better than nothing.

For all of you that hate WGA, if you could come up with a good model that actually works from both a consumer and business economic model, you could write your ticket to wealth beyond your dreams. It's not a simple problem.
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</SARCASM>
 
TechLarry said:
It seems most are thinking he is including all SHIPPED copies, not sold, as well as all corporate licenses (used or not - corps have the option to use XP or Vista for their licenses, and most are NOT using Vista yet).

I think it's pretty much a BS answer from a guy who's a master at BS.
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You’re probably right, as others have said the same. But the money is still green, investors are not too worried about how the licenses are used, and it seems that Vista's internet presence is growing every month, so if not all 100 million licenses are in use, there are still 10's of millions that are. That's still an order of magnitude faster than OS X and desktop Linux combined.

Not bad for Windows ME 2!:D
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
I hear you, man! I try to do things like listen to my MP3s, and Microsoft makes a pop-up come up that says I should pay for my music, and refuses to play the music unless it's ina "certified" WMA format that I can't listen to on any other computer or MP3 player. I try to watch an AVI, and Microsoft says I should buy the DVDs - even for home videos!
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Bad boy, you know when you say such things it's proper behavior to close it with </sarcasm>... shame on you, you're riling up the n00bs! :)
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Bad boy, you know when you say such things it's proper behavior to close it with </sarcasm>... shame on you, you're riling up the n00bs! :)
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I've lost count of the number of posts and articles that claim much of what LstOfTheBrunnenG said. There are people who blame Vista DRM for everything from preventing them from playing standard DVD movies to $100 barel oil <sarcasim/>;).

But really, some of the claims about Vista DRM have been out there. Just read some of Peter Gutmann's claims.
 
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