Vista Sales Strong, Higher Than Expected 394
An anonymous reader writes "Despite reports, it seems Microsoft is not only alive, but has been thriving these last few months. Following Apple's solid earnings yesterday comes above-expectation reporting from Microsoft. Profits jumped 65% from the previous year, and sales of its Windows operating system were strong: 'Microsoft said it deferred $1.2 billion in Windows Vista revenue to the third quarter, to account for upgrade coupons given to PC buyers during the holiday season before the consumer launch of the new operating system. Excluding this figure, client revenue totaled $4.1 billion, 30 percent higher than last year.' Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said Vista beat internal forecasts by $300 million to $400 million, and Office 2007 sales were $200 million better than expected."
Someone had better tell Ballmer (Score:4, Informative)
Then someone had better tell Ballmer. He's been saying forecasts were over-optimistic:
"Ballmer's comments came during a conference call with financial analysts in which he repeatedly hammered home the theme that sales forecasts for Windows -- Vista in particular -- have been "overly optimistic."
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/id;7680622;fp;
Obviously, Ballmer thinks people's "expectations" were "overly optimistic"; now we're being told they were overly pessimistic. There's a disconnect somewhere.
Re:Sketchy figures... (Score:5, Informative)
--
Simon
M$ is lying (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't he do that all the time? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well it figures (Score:3, Informative)
These are facts. Reported to the SEC. You can't call raw, concrete sales revenue/profit "astrotuf," especially when they provide the breakdown of numbers with coupons excluded. There isn't even any gray area left.
Just because you don't like Microsoft doesn't mean everything positive about them is astroturf. I'm hoping it's because you didn't bother reading the article, but you come across like a bitter twelve year old.
Re:No! Microsoft runs 24x7 enterprises like NASDAQ (Score:1, Informative)
Upon examination, year after year though in reality? Well, it's still "Windows #1" out there though, as the most widely used client-server Operating System platform, bar-none, in the home and on business fronts in department servers, right up to enterprise class ones!
(For example on that last account, business: NASDAQ runs its entire 24x7 operations on Windows Server 2003 SP #2 failover clusters + SQLServer 2005 as the db engine, & IIS 6.x for internet services for those former db engines, largely from what I last heard in the trade rags, and NASDAQ's getting 99.999 (fabled "five 9's") type of uptime & reliability using that setup and Microsoft wares to create and run it).
That's telling myself at least, that Windows is "not just for kids" anymore as 'wintendo', and Microsoft's OS + backoffice industrial apps (SQLServer & IIS) can do the job the "big boys" like IBM (AIX, & zOS midrange/mainframe series OS) and various UNIX vendors, including Linuxes & other derivants of NIX, can, and interoperate with them as well if needed, just fine (cross platform developer here since 1995 professionally, so I know this part works just fine and middlewares out there from IBM for DB/2, SQLServer, Oracle, etc. are mature at this point in time as well).
Still, Linux #1?
There's little question that Windows is more ubiquitous and flexible than NIX's are and certainly moreso than IBM's zOS series (line of business processing and batchprocess work is where I have mostly seen this in action over time).
I will admit, imo @ least, that the closest competitor in terms of flexibility Microsoft's competition presents imo, is Linux. It is getting better & better over time, but is always a step or two behind Microsoft's Windows. This is what "kills it" imo. Or rather, holds it down, just being a BIT behind all the time!
(HOWEVER, from what I understand? Some areas Linux excels in over Windows though! Not many but some, possibly, like beowulf clustering being better than Ms' failover clusters, or even possibly their Compute Cluster Edition of their OS & also defintely, as far as portability to more hardware types, but this was a conscious decision by MS because NT 3.5x was portable to around 3-4 platforms (in MIPS, x86, Alpha, etc.) and Microsoft stopped doing that for some reason (concentrating on the most used platform there is in x86 most likely imo). I can think of no others though where Linux shows superiority technically. Perhaps others can add more things Linux is 'better at' than Windows is for me, thanks).
However, again, we've all been hearing this for 12-15 years now, that Linux is going to be "number #1 next year" and it never happens. Never hurts to have faith, but how long do you do so, before you find out you were championing the one that never won period?
Re:No! (Score:5, Informative)
As for Xerox, well APPLE stole from them, not MS.
Here we go... Xerox invented then ignored the personal computer as we know it and Xerox management didn't "get" that, much like HP didn't "get" the Woz. Xerox was a COPIER company who was playing in computers only because IBM started making COPIERS. Management wasn't serious about computers and was happy enough to sell off the technology.
Apple actually licensed the technology from Xerox and hired some of the design team. I worked for Xerox at the Training Center when all that was going down. Yes, I worked on the Xerox Alto workstations, the Xerox 820-II CP/M machines and even touched a Star 8010 Workstation just before they dumped it all.
Re:No! (Score:3, Informative)
It's "in MSDN", no need for "the". Learning GL means you can use GL on the platform you learned it on. They all have various incompatabilities and differences in how they operate. There are some libraries that try to take care of this all, but usually they fall short of the quality one would expect from a game company if given the time to do a proper release. Also, you need to consider that it's Direct3D, as GL provides no real competition to DX as a whole. And here's the strong-man showing your true goal to push inaccurate FUD. DX is much more an enterprise class API with the debugging and profiling support than GL. MS has teams of people you can call and get support from. GL has the internet. Expecially if we consider managed DirectX, then programming in GL you will often end up trying to add things in that DX already has such as reference counted buffers and texture management.
Re:Sketchy figures... (Score:2, Informative)
For example, if you were, say HR & Block and you make money for only 3 months out of the year, instead of marking all your revenue for that quarter and posting a loss the other 3 quarters, you would defer some of that revenue and "use" it some of the other three quarters if you have salaried employees
Also, they aren't counting the upgrade coupons as full sales next year
Seriously, this is very normal.