Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China 457
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."
Things working against them. (Score:5, Interesting)
1: Less performance than XP.
2: Lots of bugs.
3: Perceived lack of need to upgrade.
4: The fact that china is the piracy capital of the world.
5: Windows vista costs more than two dozen weeks wages for the average worker, so its expensive even to the rich.
Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
244 Vista users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Things working against them. (Score:4, Interesting)
What's funny (Score:5, Interesting)
And the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to the overwhelming piracy in China, whatever genuine # came out would seem pathetic. Anyone have the stats on "genuine" DVD sales in China?
Re:Things working against them. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Piracy is theft (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's none of us deny that software piracy is illegal and to some degree... wrong (in that you're doing something to something someone created that they don't want done to it, of course, that doesn't say anything about just _how_ wrong it is... i would bet, not that wrong ultimately). However, poor sales of the software in China alone does not say anything about causation, simply correlation.
My point is this. Sure, piracy exists, but we cant blame poor software sales on piracy _alone_. After all, if we were to do that, people might start doing crazy things like complaining that people wont buy crappy music because of internet downloads, when the reality is that some music just sucks. If we had awesome Vista sales in the US, and poor sales in China, and you considered Chinese market factors on the process and built an actual model to analyze it, then maybe, maybe you could say something conclusive about piracy. You however, are just making a bigoted guess, at best.
I won't even install my LEGIT copy, for free (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent the whole day there doing a test upgrade of my xp box to vista. quite a few things didn't work for me.
the deal was that we give MS some feedback on the install and we get, in return, a retail boxed ultimate copy.
they kept their promise and I got mine in the mail.
however, I don't plan to install mine. not sure what I'll do with it, but even for free - I'm not willing to install the drm-posing-as-an-os on my system.
I do use XP for photo work (and xp makes a GREAT platform for vnc-client, btw) but xp will be the last MS o/s that I ever install.
when people refuse to install legit copies FOR FREE, then you know you have a PR problem on your hands..
Marketing 101: Success vs Failure by the #s (Score:3, Interesting)
But CUSTOMERS always determine success or failure in various markets. With the 244 MS China sales reps, IT guys & crackers having bought a copy of VISTA to jump start sales, the rest of China has given MS's VISTA a slamdown.
3rd world sales of VISTA are worse than the OS cost as other things cost more:
1. New Hardware needed in maybe 80%+ of users
2. New or patched applications & MS Office needed
3. Maybe your new PC goes into slowdown if you bought one with a pirated version of VISTA
How much is an OS worth & why is a stand-alone VISTA copy so high?
I seem to recall I bought my family pack of OSX 10.4 for around $150 for use on up to 5 computers, and there was no choice in which of 6 versions of OSX I would buy, and I did not fear that all sorts of things would crash when I upgraded from 10.3 (and they didn't).
Just my opinion, but I think Ballmer goes by 2010. I understand that pricing as high as the market will bear works in Tiffanys, but OS's are COMMODITIES. Ballmer is trying to moosh the numbers so MS stock price goes up or at least holds. Customers vote with their feet and their wallets, and Ballmer will never be able to spin customer demand.
Ok (Score:4, Interesting)
To different things, as recognized by our founding fathers.
Copyright is a sticky issue. While I believe in copyright, what exists right now is wrong, abusive, and exactly the reason many founding fathers want to excplicitly not allow copyright. Which is why we have a compromise of letting congress i.e. the people, determine what it shuold be.
Personally, automatic copyright for 14 years, then a 12 time 14 years extension for 10,000 dollars would be fair.
Please note I did not say the copyright violations are right.
"...nd how it does not deprive the software-maker of anything of value."
The only people I ever read or hear saying that are people comlaining about the "anti-copyright crowd".
Even then, not all copyright violation hurt software makers.
For example, software from a defunct company, or software that is no longer for sale in any version.
For example: I am trying to get a copy of Carcossonne that was released a few years ago. You can no longer buy it from the people that made it, and it was released on CD only in Germany.
It's not in any software store, it is not available through ebay to the US, and it is not sold directly through the site anyumore. Which would be my perfered method.
My next step is to contact the company and see if they can help. If not, I may try to just get a copy of it. Which, from the makers point of view, no different then buying it from a used software store. Which I would do, except it isn't available.
AS for MS, I don't believe them. They have been putting pressure on China to change their copyright laws(which they believe would magically change the culture) and they have been known to lie to get their way.
Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? That can't possibly be true unless a Vista license costs more than about $3,000 (the average individual income in China is $1,090; families typically earn two to three times individuals).
You can't look at a country with 1.3 billion people and take average income as a pricing indicator anyway. MS could price Vista for the top 1% of earners there and still end up with 13 million copies sold. You're trying to turn this into an economic issue, but the fact of the matter is the pitiful number that they have sold has to be due to something else - be it piracy, poor product reception, or whatever.
Re:244 Vista users? (Score:2, Interesting)
>I know ONE vista user, and she just bought a new laptop, with vista onboard.
I know exactly two. One of them is a Microsoft recruiter, and the other just installed an MSDN version on his MacBook Pro, just so that he could learn the procedure (he has no plans to actually use it.)
XP out sells Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
OEM XP is out selling OEM Vista by about 9:1.
Retail XP is out selling Retail Vista by about 40:1.
Re:Piracy is theft (Score:2, Interesting)
this is off topic from the article, sort of, but I wanted to provide a true story to further illustrate when downloading or copying is/should be 100% legal.
A friend of mine had his grandmother staying with him for whatever reason, and she decided to clean his place while he was running errands one day. Eventually, he figures out that she accidentally threw out his Windows XP cd. He still had the original product key so he decided he'd call MS up and see if they could ship him a new cd. After verifying that the key was valid and he was the rightful owner, they said it would be $50 or more (i can't remember the exact figure, but it was at least $50) + shipping to get a new disk. My friend (and I) expected a reasonable fee would be required (possibly $10 to cover the plastic and the pretty ink printing), but not a fee that was basically the same as buying a whole new Windows copy with a brand new key.
REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?
Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)
that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.
once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.
I think that's the real thing that is going on.
in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.
Re:244 Vista users? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:5, Interesting)
I switched to Ubuntu. I no longer have too much time to fuck around with a computer system, so that's why I picked the hand-holding of Ubuntu. It works well for most of my uses. I still use the crippled version of windows on a small partition to play video games, and I've managed to patch it using the "offline patch" ISO maker some german IT company made to get the latest patches (above and beyond SP2). I still don't trust it in the slightest, so the only thing that gets installed are video games. I don't go to webpages except to download game patches and occasional mods. Otherwise, I stay in Ubuntu.
It went remarkably well. To be totally honest with you, the only thing I want right now is to be able to play Project Reality (BF2 mod), The Hidden and Dystopia (HL2 mods), and NWN1 in Linux. It's probably even possible to do that with Wine or Cedega or something, but they took WAY too much fucking effort the last time I looked into it, and when given a choice between spending 6 hours+ per game, or waiting 2 minutes between a reboot into XP, I'll take the latter.