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."
244? (Score:5, Funny)
"Vista's" (Score:2, Funny)
Ummm...not to be too pedantic, but I've never heard of "Windows Vista's". I have heard of Windows Vista, the plural of which is "Vistas".
Re:"Vista's" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:244? Yes 244 master copies (Score:5, Funny)
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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:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get you hooked on the cheap/free and then put the price up.
The cheap is edu copies etc, the free is the piracy. But eventually, as you say, the WGA starts to kick in and suddenly your OS starts dropping functionality. When faced with operating system cold turkey what can you do?
It's very clever...
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.
Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:4, Insightful)
And so it shall be done!!!!
Poof! http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html [bioware.com]
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:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:5, Insightful)
That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
A very similar scenario is playing in China where a tiny fraction of the population accounts for nearly all of the income from the economic boom.
+1 You beat me to it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 p
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I must point out that "average income" is never reliably representative of any population in any country. It takes only one multi-billionaire to render the whole metric useless. That is why "average income" is a darling of various economic propagandists rather then those who try to figure out the economy seriously. That is of course why "average income" is very frequently and breathlessly being talked about by
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The misunderstanding that is occurring here is that some people are using 'average income' to mean 'the income of the average person' rather than 'the average income of all the people.' It's a common linguistic sloppiness, and needs no justification other than, "I was being linguistically sloppy."
No one can argue that mean income is a more useful metr
Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:4, Funny)
Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Funny)
From Microsoft's perspective. From the user's perspective it can be considered a loss.
Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Nobody really cares to buy your product
b) Your products are far over priced
c) Most everyone is successfully pirating your product, therefor please justify the burden of product activation (including such features as limited hardware changes) you place on your legitimate, paying customers?
We-Dont-Buy-Vista~~yes, we cant affort it (Score:4, Informative)
Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)
Frictional Users (Score:2)
There are 8,576,336 users already.
Only if new PCs can only be purchased with Vista. While Vista's half life may exceed the 12 minutes it takes to 0wn XP on any network, it's still short enough that only a fraction of those new PCs will have Vista in two weeks time. As for "pirates" and legitimate buyers, the supposed upgrade won't install and play the ten dollar DVDs the would be user purchased, so they never really become users.
Vista's going the ME route.
Another Embarrassing Figure (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Things working against them. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Things working against them. (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not just the rich. The rich are certainly very very rich, but even the middle-class in China has very good buying power. There are many households in China that hire someone part time to do maid work. They don't spend a huge amount of money on housing and they don't invest as much for retirement (although both these things are changing). Costs for western name brand products (gadgets, clothing, fast food, StarBucks, etc.) is more or less the same as what you would find in the West. However, food (groc
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Maybe the American price. Probably not what Microsoft is charging in China, the Chinese price is almost certainly less.
Re:I dispute #5 (Score:4, Funny)
Mayhaps. But very few of those earn that kind of money by buying trash and keeping it.
Woohoo (Score:2, Funny)
Is that a genuine Windows SKU? (Score:5, Insightful)
No worries, they can spin it... (Score:5, Funny)
Bill gates says ... (Score:5, Funny)
Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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To be fair, the multilingualization in Vista is done by MUI so you can turn your English Vista into the Chinese version fairly easily. But the packaging and shipping cost really doesn't make sense, they could release the Chinese Vista only in a downloadable version via network.
Is that "genuine"... (Score:2)
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244 Vista users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:244 Vista users? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know ONE vista user, and she just bought a new laptop, with vista onboard.
The only big issue thus far, other than moving menus changing age old commands like search and replace with search and mark IIRC, is the lack of all in one printer drivers. For example the hp 3055 will print, but the software suite won't install.
She presently considers downgrading to XP to be a little extreme, as it's her belief that the world is going vista and she will be SOL with XP. You or I could just plop in the system restore discs, but this is a complaint from an average user. Also, as we are talking dual core CPUs, one has to get XP-pro or tablet/mediacenter edition. Costs too damned much, or too damned hard to find.
Aside from that, there are people who like the new flashy graphics. Even I somewhat like the new alt-tab program switcher where there is a carousel of screens which actually display what each window is presently displaying. But due to CPU use I wouldn't use it.
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>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.)
Technicaly I did meet one man who worked at microsoft with a Toshiba R20 (IIRC) tablet PC which was running a beta of vista. There had to have been a damned good reason to run vista as vista didn't support shifting the aspect from portrait to landscape, the pen wasn't supported, pretty much everything the PC was designed to be wasn't supported except the base minimum. And even then on 1gig of memory it was slugish. But I can't say I know him.
Only 244 Pirating Outfits in China (Score:2)
It would have been less. (Score:5, Funny)
What's funny (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was misinformed!
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?
Source? (Score:5, Informative)
Really poor submission
Type declarations (Score:2)
'nuff said.
So. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work, people are scratching it off their new machines and installing XP.
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So, do they use a knife to scratch it off the hard drive? They may not be the ones you want modifying their own systems.
Yet Vista Install Base in China is 100,000 (Score:2)
China: open source paradise (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this the same slashdot that celebrates mass piracy? We all know that the chinese don't buy software, music, or movies and for some bizarre reason everyone on slashdot celebrates it. They are taking money from us-- they are blatantly robbing our largest industries. This isn't bringing us any closer to the magical open source commune you people envision for the future, it's only bringing us closer to poverty.
What do you think the US's role is in the world market? How many of you work in steel, ammonia, or aerospace?
I don't suppose any of you work in software, which depends on sales- possibly web industries that depend on paying customers who aren't buying bootleg products- maybe even the financial industry, which is adversely affected by the lack of revenue our media firms and software companies see out of China.
Stop being fanboys and start thinking like we're competing in a world market and our jobs are not secure.
I suppose you'd all like to see the market shift to an open source model, where all the code is written in east europe and china where its cheaper, and those of us who once wrote software here are then waiting tables for the executives and managers who were smart enough to outsource all their R&D and engineering as soon as possible.
Selling software, entertainment products, and media in China is really the best outcome for our middle class- it doesn't only benefit a few fatcat moguls, like most of you have fooled yourself into thinking.
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Face it, MS treats the majority of its customers like shitty thieves. Even the most brainwashed employee with stock options knows this. It isn't even about quality, its about disrespect shown to c
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You'd better wake-up because no big country can survive selling (ok, renting) intelctual property. No one.
If you didn't notice yet, China has copyright laws because THEIR gorvernment choosed to have. And they choosed to have IP because they think it would benefit THEMSELVES. If it somehow stop benefiting themselves (like it becoming huge imports, but very small exports), chinese governemnt can simply not enforce IP anymore, or enforce it in a more benefical way (like only recognizing their people's IP).
No
I'm surprised it's that many (Score:5, Funny)
Who are the 244 morons who actually paid?
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Piracy is fun (Score:4, Informative)
This is madness! (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
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Vista is stupid to sell there (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of IDIOT would you have to be to pay for a "genuine" Vista in China when you can buy a "non-genuine" one for a dollar?!
Marketing it in China was a huge waste of money. But whatever, Microsoft has money to burn.
OEM's are MS's saving grace (Score:4, Insightful)
Export licences? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people don't know, but the US exerts complete juristication and control over exports. I would have thought MS-Vista falls under the "publicly available" software exemption, but this wouldn't cover ITAR rules on munitions (incl encryption).
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..
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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 m
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.
Now, what could be the reason? (Score:2)
I think the strongest reason is simply that in China, computers have not become the household item they are here. It's still a luxury, bought by people who want a computer, not a toy. Bought by people who know at least a bit about them and who are able to assemble them (or at the very least know someone who does). Don't forget, almost all large integrato
Out and out ignorance (Score:3, Funny)
It's not just piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
You could say it was due to pirating if their projected sales are down by 1-5%, you can't say it if you didn't sell ANYTHING AT ALL. Let's be serious, 250 copies is not really a pirating problem (especially with the draconian DRM/WGA and the buggy/infected patches), it's a resale problem, people don't want your product, not even Chinese Americans that adore Microsoft or first adopters that want the latest and greatest. People don't even want it when they BUY a computer and get Vista for FREE (Vista OEM price = XP OEM price) and don't tell me that a country with over a billion people didn't buy more than 250 computers the last 2 weeks, even though a lot of people are poorer than their westerner counterparts, there are a bunch of companies, a bunch of gadget freaks (more than the US I think) as well as a bunch of filthy rich (richer than you and me). China is not the 3rd world country, the west wants us to believe. Sure it's a poorer country, more mining accidents and their government sucks, but it may be a 2nd world (like us during and right after the industrial revolution or the world wars), but I wouldn't call it 3rd world (as in massive amounts of people dying of malnutrition and no hospitals or massive internal wars).
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.
That's weird... (Score:5, Funny)
Aha! (Score:4, Funny)
Well, 243, plus that one idiot who actually bought a copy to use...
Whoever posted the story must be an idiot, unless. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No wonder since Microsoft started leaking Vista (Score:2)
Re:Piracy is theft (Score:4, Funny)
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Let's hear the Slashdot crowd claim, once again, how software piracy is not really theft, and how it does not deprive the software-maker of anything of value.
And, of course, how the software-maker's steps to prevent the piracy are unethical, while the piracy itself is not.
I think you have that backwards! When a consumer is forced to purchase Vista with their new PC, it is the purchaser who is deprived of value. I'm willing to bet that even in China not too many people are even pirating Vista, never mind buying it...
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Why are you changing the subject? We are talking about retail purchases of Vista... In any case, one disagreeing with the seller is not justified stealing the seller's wares.
"Not too many" means "only a few millions" in China. Are you sincerely stating here, that 244 licenses really is the num
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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
Piracy is NOT theft (Score:2, Insightful)
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Only if you put thousand island dressing on it.
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The McDonald's analo
Re:Piracy is theft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you asked for it, so here we go. Software piracy is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which may or may not be fraud. The purchaser of the software, having agreed to the conditions of the sale, breeches his/her contract when he/she copies that software and gives it away. As such, most cases of non-commercial software piracy should remain civil matters between the buyer and seller of the software. It is only when the pirate sells the illegitimate software as legitimate software, or otherwise commits piracy for profit should criminal charges come into play.
That is why software piracy is not theft, and should not be a crime. As for piracy being unethical, I can see real world cases where it perfectly ethical. If you buy a software product, and your disc breaks and the company will not supply a replacement, I would not find it immoral to supply you with a copy of mine. But when we start creating bullshit words like "intellectual property" so that we can make software piracy look more like theft or that only pirates would ever need to circumvent a protection device, is where we start to point the ethic finger back at the software industry and tell them to look in the mirror for a change.
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If I'll breach a contract, I'd try to hide it in a less conspicuous place than my pants...
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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 i
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.
Cut with the "economy" illusion already (Score:2)
Bulk of the profits from any mega corporation goes to major stockholders' pockets, and they either stash that cash up in swiss banks, or spend them on lavish houses or cars, restaurants and whatnot at inflated prices - the fraction of population who benefits from those are pathetically small percentage of the society.
It has been that way since first colonial companies have been founded, and it is still that way today.
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If you could post some facts to back up your rhetoric I would be glad to take a look. Serious facts backed up by research that says what you claim is true- no s
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in the extreme poor level, it fails. no enterpreurship there.
in the extreme rich level, it goes way out of balance. it was said to me before in college that all the stuff in the world that can be bought/valued by money couldnt meet the total value funds in swiss banks. hence, that money there was money without the possibility of buying something physical.
the problem is, investment is not forced. major capital sets up monopolies, new companies, buys out com
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2. I, for one, welcome our new pirate overlords.
3. ????
3. Profit!!!
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Seriously. What do you want/expect Microsoft to do about this? Realise that piracy is rampant in China? Realise that people can always get a pirated copy cheaper than a licensed copy, no matter how cheap it is?
I think we can assume that Microsoft already know this. So what do you want them to wake up to? Do you want them to under-cut the pirates???