Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well 320
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."
Hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)
People will wait until they need to purchase a new machine that it comes with Vista.
Things have to *work* first.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.
Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.
This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.
They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.
No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been testing Vista at work and it's a good OS, but not ready for deployment yet. It's not Vista itself, it's apps and drivers. There's still plenty of hardware with drivers that aren't up to snuff, and a number of apps need to be updated to work on Vista. It's not the kind of thing I'd recommend most users walk in to yet. In another 3-6 months I'll probably look at deploying it to some of our labs.
Office, on the other hand, we are installing for anyone that orders a new copy. The volume keys are valid for either 2003 or 2007 so we are installing 2007 and will revert to 2003 if they don't like it. So far, nobody has asked to revert. There's just not really any technical issues. Yes there's a new interface and all, but all your documents open and that's the real concern.
Re:Imagine if people actually had a choice! (Score:2, Interesting)
What I found most disturbing was that the majority of the Vista PCs were severely under equipped for the job. Sure, they had a plenty fast processor, but most only came with 256MB or 512MB of RAM and integrated video cards that used up to 50% of the system's main RAM! Still, the PC area was packed by folks looking for a new Vista-installed PC.
The clerks in the area immediatly tried to show me one of these worthless systems, but I firmly told them I was not interested in Vista. One took me aside saying he didn't blame me and confirmed my assessment that most of the systems they were selling wouldn't even run Vista very well. Instead he pointed me to the small stack of XP systems they had left which were marked down 20%. We ended up choosing a Gateway system that has a Pentium D processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive for $600.
Re:Thing is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, it was recent enough that MS offered a free upgrade to Vista when it was released. So now I have a free Vista upgrade that I'll hold onto until I run across an application what won't run on XP. So, that'll maybe be five years from now, when a lot of the bugs in Vista have been worked out and a lot of the opressive DRM has been disabled, I'll run across some app that wants Vista and I'll have it.
Or, if Linux developers can manage to keep up, I'll be able to do what I want in Linux without needing a PhD in Linuxology. I still use Linux for most of my work. Games and video editing are on Windows. That's just the way it is right now.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that a lot of the Office 2007 sales are due to this -- Microsoft makes it hard for people to continue to use old versions, even though they work. So they give up and buy Office 2007 whether they need it or not.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Summary is misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, he did.
No, it's just admitting bad news. If I admit Matrix Revolutions sucked ass, it doesn't mean I was praising it before. It just means I'm saying something I wish wasn't true, but is. Admit means "confess to be true or to be the case, typically with reluctance" according to the Oxford dictionary built into OS X.
I seem to recall the phrase "as big a leap as Windows 95" being mentioned a lot in an attempt to recapture that successful launch. Some analysts got caught up in the hype. Ballmer is admitting that those analysts are wrong.
Certainly the case with us.. (Score:4, Interesting)
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.
Re:I think you're being a bit unfair..... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty more oddities that bring her of interest to different types of people. There isn't one thing that everyone finds interesting, it is all these little conections made public that different people conect with for different reasons. If you ask enough different people that are diverse in their politics, money or religion you will find lots of differences. Even if they over lap, there would likley be something that is overriding everything else and they probably would list it first.
Re:Thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thing is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents.
Re:Queue up the chair jokes! (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in analytics for a middling consultancy. Our business runs on information and is almost entirely an MS shop (MS Server, MS SQL, MS Exchange, etc; thank goodness we don't use Sharepoint) but we have no intention of moving to Vista any time in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we have no intention of moving to Linux for the exact same reason -- that we have a lot of custom and shared applications that run on XP, and there's no business case to be made for conversion.
But while Vista is not even on the map, it is likely that at least some of us will be moving to Office 2007 before too long, partly because of the expanded capacity of Excel but even more because of the highly augmented capability of PivotTables.
I wish it could be otherwise, but we can easily generate the types of graphics we need to with Excel and PivotTables, while doing this in OSS apps is much more problematic.
When processing data on the other hand we work mostly in csv or other text-based formats, and I've introduced Vim and OpenOffice.org to the analytics department for this very purpose. Microsoft simply doesn't produce anything that that can easily, reliably, and predictably work with text formats. No matter how many times you specify cell format in Excel you can never be sure if 25000 will export as
We can perform certain operations in Calc now that used to take more than twice as long in MS Office and required using both Excel and Access (as well as Notepad for tracking down strange text formatting errors).
I've been doing some testing recently with Pentaho (open source BI suite) and am very excited at the developments I see. But I'm not sure that it will do what we need without substantial coding to make it compatible with the other systems we use.
I imagine that a year from now Vista will still be a novelty in the business world, though I fear MS Office 2007 will be unavoidable.