Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China

morpheus83 writes "Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."

Source?

[AlHunt]

Oddly, the only references in the "story" (TFA) are a circular reference back to site itself and an unintelligible link to a story in Japanese. I see nothing that substantiates the claim of 244 copies sold.

Really poor submission ...

Re:Cost

[rolfwind]

And yield the market to Linux?

Yes, they have XP now, but if MS rested on their laurels, they would have less (propietary formats, APIs, etc) to lock in users in the future since Linux could catch up if they remained a stationary target.

Piracy is fun

[j0se_p0inter0]

When I lived in Beijing, my g/f needed Windows reinstalled on her comp but didn't have a CD. We went to a local market in Chao Yang district and bought a copy of XP for 8 yuan ($1). They have boxes of cd's in shrinkwrap...Autocad, Photoshop, Flash, whatever you need. And if you buy a bunch you can bargain for a discount. Don't even get me started on DVD's... Combine that with the fact that beer is cheaper than water over there and you can see I obviously had a good time :)

Re:Is that a genuine Windows SKU?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a pirated copy of vista.

the tiny chinese text at the bottom says:
- Complete removal of time limitations
- Free Live
- Upgradable on the Internet

Re:Source?

[Gregory Cox]

Wait a minute, I think it's this article [zol.com.cn].

Re:Piracy is NOT theft

[spun]

Stealing is depriving someone of something. When you copy something, you are not depriving the owner of their copy. You are depriving them of YOUR money. Like I am depriving McDonald's of MY money when I make my own burger. Copyright infringement IS NOT THEFT. It is a crime here, and a civil matter in other countries, but it IS NOT THEFT. I'm not depriving them of anything that was theirs to begin with. Why is that so hard to understand? It does not need to be theft in order to be wrong.

The McDonald's analogy was not the most apt, I'll admit, but under the law, and by any sane definition, copyright infringement is not theft. You can say the sky is green, but that does not make it so. I would love to know how you classify it as theft when no legal system in the world does so.

Re:Piracy is theft

[geekoid]

"And sells it to millions of others depriving the maker of a lot of money -- stealing..."

No not stealing. There is very specific lawys regaurding copyright infringement.
Just because someone 'pirates' a copy, does not mean that person would have bought it anyways, and the copyright holder had nothing removed from there inventory.

"By this logic, buying stolen property is not theft, and should not be a crime. "

It shouldn't be a crime. Look at all the stuff in your home, how do you know the company you bought it from functioned 100% legally? You don't, and you can't. The consumer should not be held liable if the person they bought it from aquired it through fraud.

"Buying a cracked Vista CD is no ethically different from buying an in-dash GPS unit, for example, freshly torn out from some sucker's vehicle."
It is telling that you uise the word 'Sucker' and not trhe appropriet word 'Victim'.
In this case the victime is out a physical unit. If I pirate vista, home many copies wuill be missing from MS inventory? none. Only a lost opportunity to sell a copy.
That is defferent. I am not saying it's ok, only that it is different, anf there are plenty of reasons why.

If you still think it's theft, I recommend you study the legal side of copyright as well as it's history. Also read up on the arguments presented when it was being discussed as to wether or not to allow it when they were writing the Constitution.

Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale

[IgnoramusMaximus]

1. GP first brought up the point that the average income was less than the cost of a copy of Vista. You should've directly replied to GP instead of parent. You replied to parent hoping to get more attention, since parnet was modded higher

They are both wrong except that the GP is (by accident) closer to the truth.

Also your accusation of my replies being based on Slahsdot moderation is comical. First of all when I did reply the post was not moderated at all. Two, the whole point of moderation is to bring posts to one's attention. And thus to guarantee they get red more and get more replies. Or has that part escaped you?

2. Average income is used throughout the world to gauge the poverty levels of a society, including US and UK. And I do believe they have sane economists.

Averages (when it comes to income) are used by various dishonest propagandists to fool the arithmetically challenged voters into believing that various economic scenarious represent the exact opposite of what they represent. Subsequently you can find the so-called "mainstream" media bloviating about "average" incomes all over the place. Actual researchers do no such thing because they do have a grasp of mathematics. I even gave you a practical example to illustrate how the averages are a completely useless metric when it comes to vastly diverging incomes, but then again you missed that part too.

Re:I won't even install my LEGIT copy, for free

[TheGratefulNet]

I was serious about vnc.

my back-end server is freebsd 6.latest. that's may always-on box and it holds my 'desktop', with xterm-alikes, browser windows and 'tail -F' sessions.

my keyboard, mouse and display is on my xp box. start of the day: power up the xp box, have it quick-resume then double-click on vnc-viewer and I'm fullscreen on my unix box. just where I left it.

the reason xp is 'good' for this is that its video driver is faster than x11 (for good and bad reasons) and actually I'm using vnc as the main app and xp is just 'the support o/s for vnc-viewer' ;) as a thin pass-thru, vnc+xp isn't a bad deal! and the 3button mouse emulation (or 5button) I get is perfect so on a gig-e connection on a lan, you really can't TELL you're not local on the bsd or linux box.

at the end of the day, you simply put the xp box to HIBER and power off. or let it do that by itself. xp is good about that.

proper tool for the proper job. my desktop is tri-boot (xp, linux, bsd) and I can run vnc-viewer on any of those os's to my back end bsd box. but like I said, xp is the thinnest passthru and its the best UI experience IF you run vnc on top of it and connect to a remote box on the same lan. this 2-box style of working has all the benefits of a 'stateful desktop' on unix and the speed of the binary only (sigh) drivers for the video card I have on the hardware I have.

Whoever posted the story must be an idiot, unless.

[dayeliu]

Whoever posted the original thread must be an idiot, unless he just tries to misinform the public for whatever personal agenda. According to the "joyo", an Amazon partner in China, they have cleared their Vista stock by 2/13/2007. Although they didn't reveal the numbers, Joyo started selling 10 versions of Vista with price range from $100 to $500 since 1/30/2007. Joyo is the largest retailer of Vista in China according to Microsoft. I also dug out the 244's origin. It was Vista sold by a much smaller (and little know) shop "8848" from 1/19/2007 to 2/2/2007. This is an perfect example of fabrication and distortion in its worst. The number is the result of a marketing research by a firm ZDC, with no relation to MS. Shame on you Slashdot!

We-Dont-Buy-Vista~~yes, we cant affort it

[imkow]

I'm a Chinese in China with a computer experience of 14 years(since 386 with dos 3.3), let me say some reasons i knew about. Vista is too expensive. 300 dollar(ultimate edition) means 2200 RMB. Many people buy a whole PC priced less than 3000 RMB here in China. Individuals won't pay anything 'software' of which price is higher than 100 rmb(14USD). Yes, if microsoft can make a geniune copy less than 100RMB, i believe everyone in China will consider it. It would be going to be a shame not to own a genuine one. But for a product now priced more than half of my computer and can be bought, copied and downloaded everywhere, I definitly going to save some money. Owning computer is no longer a luxury in China since most computer parts are manufactured here(including almost every major brand). Everyone is going to have computer at various price. Also rich people won't think of owning a genuine copy a prestige. Long ago their taste switched to cars and houses. Those worst poors dont want computer at all but food and a place to live. If ask me why there were only 244 retail sold, I'd say microsoft knew this and they dont care. More over, i doubt some microsoft dudes leaked some vista copys on purpose. How can you explain that up-to-date, fully-automatic and one-click vista activator published by some vista fan forum? it must be with assitance of a microsoft insider. The activator make every copy working exactly as a geniune one, with one click and well-documented instructions and a support forum.. Also the news covering this 244 sales is misleading people. That number was the sales of one online software store(8848 Sofeware Store in Beijing) in two weeks. So , there was just one store. i believe the total sales in China was far higher than 244.

Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China

[sponga]

a.) people are choosing to rather pirate XP/Vista than take a free OS(this country is not fully developed either so they are not forced to use MS standards)might not care to buy it or cannot afford it but doesn't mean that they do not like using it.
b.) so if they are overpriced than why are people choosing to pirate it rather than take a free OS
c.)only burden I had with WGA was when I had a pirated copy and had to constantly trying to beat it; yet when I buy a legal copy I never run into those problems anymore. So stop the exaggerating and stop with the fear mongering of the hardware change FUD. We have been through this that all you have to do is call up MS if you somehow have to change your motherboard 10+ times; even than after that whole fiasco where everyone got worked up over it and MS specifically stated publicly that they would not restrict(but of course that follow up article never got published here, along with many other from MS).

Hell, already I decided to test out my 2 extra free copies of Vista and have already changed the video card 2 times, the motherboard 6 times, 3 different hard drives separate times and done multiple different installs on one key with different hardware combinations to find the best performance.

Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale

[IgnoramusMaximus]

So what you're saying is one of the few real implementations of communism in practice can't be seen as an example of real communism. Please note that I didn't wrap any of those terms in scare quotes. I don't feel it is necessary.

No, I am saying that the propagandists (both Capitalist and Marxist) have mislabelled the thing for various political reasons.

This does not mean that I believe "communism" as envisioned by Marx is workable.

All I am pointing out is that the term "communism" is stolen by Marxists from much older movements. The Bolsheviks (the actual name of the Soviet ideology) re-branded themselves also that way (in order to subsume other competing movements who saw themsevels as "communist" in some way or another) and the rest is history. In later times even the Soviets shied away from the term "communism" and preferred to call themselves "socialist" instead.

Communism as it was historically understood prior to the modern industrial era was all about building ... communes. Hence the name. Self-contained small scale societies based on some sort of deep common cause, usually religious in nature.

When Marx appeared on the scene with his megalomaniac utopian ideas using the term "communism" he sent the capitalists into a proverbial hysteria. And ever since "communism" became synonymous in the West with Marxism, Totalitarianism and whatever latest anti-capitalist boogeyman can be conjured.

Yeah, yeah, I know that communism in it's purest form is only practiced in paneled rooms with all participants comfortably seated in armchairs.

You mean Marxism. Or Libertarianism. Or whole gamut of other wacky unworkable social systems.

As I was pointing out, communism and its communes are alive and well in the USA and Canada. In my province alone there is quite a number of Mennonite communes which are operating strictly in the old-fashioned communist way. Complete with common kitchen and shared ownership of all buildings/land/crops/equipment etc. The amusing part is that those communes are actually quite wealthy since they are nearly completely self-sufficient while selling their excess crops to outsiders. They have literally millions of dollars in the bank each, which they use occasionally to purchase latest farm equipment etc. But unlike the Maxists and their kin who depended on political ideology, these communes maintain their internal order based on close family ties and religious convictions and thus will by definition always remain small.