Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well

PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."

Re:Not surprising, or why OpenOffice is gud

[WillAffleckUW]

People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!

That's one of the nice things about the free Open Source software in Open Office - you can open and save to all the formats.

Re:Not surprising

[mingot]

Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?

Also, folks using Word 2000 and later can use the new formats with a compatibilty pack [msdn.com]

Re:Not surprising

[mingot]

You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!

You're misinformed. All versions of office from 97-2k3 can open each others files with no need to do anything special when saving or loading.

Re:Not surprising

[goofballs]

slashdot crowd's supposed to be informed techies, and this gets modded insightful? he's wrong on all counts- office has had the same format from 97-2003.

Summary is misleading

[donutello]

Ballmer didn't "admit that previous sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive'".

The implication of that statement is:
- Ballmer/Microsoft issued a sales forecast in the past
- They were pressured on the accuracy of said forecast
- They admitted that their forecasts were overly aggressive.

However, that's not what happened here. The sales forecasts in question were made by external analysts. In this case, it's Ballmer and Microsoft disagreeing with the forecasts. The word "admit" implies that you are conceding something that you tried to conceal before.

Why does Slashdot need to spin every story to try and make it sound even more negative than it is?

Can't find XP on the low end anymore

[rasper99]

It's interesting that Dell doesn't sell XP on the low end machines but it's still available on the mid and high end. Their consumer calls go to India and business calls don't. Are they turning the home users into a large beta test group using the cheaper support resources?

They also have a laptop for $499 which they haven't had in quite a while. It's only available with Vista. Maybe M$ is giving it away (or almost giving it away) to Dell to infect the market?

A quick check of the HP site doesn't seem to have any XP options even on the high end.

Re:Not Surprising

[aslate]

Indeed, i'm perfectly happy with Vista and have been running it for almost a month now. It seems to network better with my XP laptop than XP did, runs at the same sort of speed as XP and i've not hit anything that's a problem. I prefer the way things seem a bit more rounded and easier to use. Control Panel has a search, type in screen resolution and it'll link to where to change it!

I wouldn't pay for this upgrade, but running Vista Business for free from my Uni's MSDNAA scheme means i get the upgrade for free and personally don't miss XP.

Re:Thing is...

[Software]

>There's even a home and student version for people who can't afford paying for standard edition.

I'm not sure if you know this, but the Home and Student edition has been around for several years. http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-Student-Tea cher-2003/dp/B0000C0XT1 [amazon.com]

Re:Not surprising

[gig]

> Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?

Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents. Yeah, when you know from experience that every conversion that MS Office makes breaks every document in some way.

Compatibility pack?! You're killing me. You have to install an extra in order to make MS Office compatible with MS Office?

Word is only a little older than the Web, huh? Word is 1985 and the Web is 1990 and by now Word ought to be compatible with itself out of the box.

Re:Thing is...

[flibuste]

The NASCAR scandal is all they can handle right now.

I'm one of the most people, and have no idea what you're talking about. However, I am well aware that Microsoft was busy releasing security patches for the last 5 years.

But 30% of those buying boxed Vista want Ultimate

[westlake]

There is something to be said for reading the fine article:

First-week retail sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista were almost 60% below sales of boxed copies of Windows XP in the week after its 2001 release

Retail sales of PCs, virtually all of them sporting the new Vista OS, were up 67% over the same week in 2006. While that is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison -- many stores were clearing out their XP inventory in the weeks leading up to Vista's launch -- "it still reflects a fair bit of growth"

The good news for Microsoft: Consumers who are upgrading to Vista on their older machines are opting for pricier, higher-end versions of it. The average selling price of Vista was $207.13, up 66% from the average selling price of XP. That was due in part to the fact that more than 30% of the copies of Vista sold were the Ultimate version, which lists for $399. Early boxed retail sales of Vista down nearly 60% compared to XP [computerworld.com]

One might, of course, have expected boxed sales of Vista to be somewhat depressed by the distribution of free upgrade coupons distributed with PCs sold over the holidays.

Re:Certainly the case with us..

[davegust]

Seems like there was a good reason [msdn.com] to remove the control from Vista. Also, it appears there are solutions [microsoft.com] for desktop apps that use the control.