Microsoft: One billion Windows users in 2008
According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the software giant is on track to break the one billion user mark by the end of the corporation’s fiscal year in 2008. Ballmer spoke at Microsoft’s analyst day yesterday, announcing the sale of 60 million copies of Windows Vista to date, and apparently couldn’t resist another fresh, interesting, and applicable comparison between computers and automobiles.
“The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion,” Ballmer told the group. “If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year ‘08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles.
Microsoft COO Kevin Turner was also on hand to reinforce the fact that Vista is, according to Redmond, the most secure operating system Microsoft has ever shipped, with only 12 vulnerabilities reported over the first 180 days (compared to 25 for Windows XP in the same period), and 21 percent fewer support calls for Vista vs. XP, again over the same period. As Eweek’s article details, Vista’s degree of application and device support are also excellent, and the OS contributed $1.9 billion dollars of revenue towards Microsoft’s bottom line thus far in fiscal year 2007.
Source: PCworld, Ars Technica
Comments(41)
How many of those would actually be using Vista… My dad bought a notebook the other day. Though it is faster than mine due to the dual core processor, it wasn’t that extremely fast. Besides it came with the annoying Norton and on top of that Vista kept nagging about stuff. “Are you sure you want to do that? Did you just came from there?”. It lacks stability and performance. Instead of going Vista Im in favor of pimping XP with tools like XPize and the Atomic Alarm Clock, which was shown last week on Rlslog. Oh well, Ive got more hope for the upcoming Windows Vienna, though I would still be using 98 today if it wasnt so hard to give it a facelift and install drivers.
Most people I know despise vista and have downgraded back to XP (although I would hardly call changing to vista a downgrade), hopefully a service pack might make it more friendly and less nagging
man! thats no good. anyway i never going to use vista, my next step will be to linux..
i like vista for its eye candy, it looks good to my eyes
but i still use windows xp on our machines at home
I will use vista when there is alot of apps compatiable with it in about 5 years :/.
for the first poster, you can disable that by disabling UAC and then all ur problems and “do u wanna do this? do u wanna do this?” are gone and the system doesnt bug you anymore.
im Running a Quad-Core 6850, Nvidia 8800 Ultra , 4gb ram etc and with vista everything runs smoothly.
to Nitroxtremee u just have to find what is compatible their is a lot that IS, and a lot of software/drivers that are NOW, when Vista was released not so much but over the last few months almost everything is!!
and their is drivers and stuff to update Vista that fix MANY problems, etc slow file transfer times etc,
Vista can be blazinly fast and beautiful if you know what to disable/install.!
How many of those were preinstalled on buy a new pc with vista.Im glad i bought my dual core amd before vista came out.Microsoft tell me that xp will be around for 10 more years now before they stop the support and updates.
I’ll never touch Vista.. when I have to get rid of XP, I’m going Linux.
Vista is the most invasive software ever produced, and ensures that the os has more control over your computer than you do.
If any of you are actually interested in how evil a piece of software Vista REALLY is, then I urge you all to read this.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
If you choose not to read it, then don’t come crying to me when you realise that you no longer have any control over your digital age.
1 billion virus targets, yeah !
more like pirated users
I bought a laptop 2 months ago, and in less than a week I had to install xp (headache),I had plenty problems with programs I use (3ds max-suitcase-genuine fractals) that weren’t vista-ready…the same laptop runs faster,with a more solid perfomance,etc I just dont want to use ram to have an OS trying to look like a mac. I was expecting the benefits of Vista without the need of more hardware perfomance. The real advance would have been if they managed to do so(Vista)running fine in less powerful computers. But they expect everybody to have 1GB ram and that’s just retarded. Besides, I had 2GB on my laptop but as I say, I rather have an ugly OS tha is fast and solid that a nice one that will make my app run slower.
@mike, hurm, that does sounds interesting. Though, it is not only the nagging, but Ive seen test results and Vista actually decreases overall performance and that is a sad thing.
@ nayab9: Indeed the so called ‘eyecandy’ might gives us a go at it, still it is better to give XP an overal visual/gfx update. With XPize, glass2k, TopDesk, Rainlender2, RocketDock, etc… your XP looks even more futuristic than Vista. (click my name to my site with free PImP XP tools)
Just so you know what you are looking at.. here are some of the “FEATURE” that Vista have FORCED upon it’s users.. all of these are explained in the article I posted a link to… read it youself if you don’t believe me.
Disabling of Functionality
Indirect Disabling of Functionality
Decreased Playback Quality
Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
Elimination of Unified Drivers
Problems with Drivers
Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation
Decreased System Reliability
Increased Hardware Costs
Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP
Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption
This is just free advertising for M$ so they can keep their brand names in the news. PCworld and Ars Technica are shit. Just like most other so-called ‘news’ they spend half their time just regurgitating what companies tell them.
I’ve used Vista since the release and so far, I haven’t had any troubles with it. It’s true that Vista is more demanding than XP, but I can hardly notice any difference in speed between XP and Vista. There were a few hiccups with drivers and such in the beginning, but those have been resolved by now.
The only problem I have with Vista is that there is no button for going a level in the directory tree, only back and forward.
The more interesting question is – How many users has MS lost to Unix, Linux and *BSD (*BSD with OSX included)?
Yes, but how many are legitimate copy’s…
See, I really like vista cause it allows for Japanese unicode support while still in English mode, meaning, I can play my H-games in English mode
.
Yeah, that’s right lulwud…
Vista was made just for perverts like you.
Yeah, that’s right lulwut…
Vista was made just for perverts like you.
I installed Vista on a P-4 3GHZ GB RAM nVidia 5600+ 256MB video card, and a SBLive!
It said my machine was a POS, and graded it ‘2.0′… I went back to XP, installed a nice Mac OS-X theme for pretties.
What sux is that software will start coming out for ‘vista’ only. Then a ‘grade’.. Like “Runs on Vista 4 computers only”, and if you’ve a ‘3.0′ then you will be screwed. It just another way for M$ to force their warez onto the world. If they can’t force you to but a new OS every year or so, they will force you to upgrade hardware. Then of course to get the ‘Vista approved’ M$ will get kickbacks from hardware manufactures.
The supreme court had a chance to stop Bill’s monopoly, but now it’s to late, and the world is stuck.
that is good news for the investors! im waiting for MSFT to hit $34 then im dumping it all..lol. got mine @ $27 back in march, hope they spew out more BS about their 1 trillion user Kbase, i dont give a fuck..:)
hey can anyone tell me how to down grade to xp cuz vista really sucks thanks in advance
@ Ted
That is actually pretty crappy. That was good hardware 3-4 years ago.
wow 1 billion potato heads using M$ windows lol
For anyone who didn’t actually RTFA, it becomes clear to me that this is basically a big promotional gimmick in the face of much lower then expected sales performance of Vista. Repeated use of the phrase “Windows Users” not “Vista” users, the point being if you want to buy windows today to join the herd, you have to buy vista. But the majority of that “Billion” users are NOT running vista. Then there’s the figures about volume of reported customer service calls and reliability are of course skewed toward a *much* larger XP user base then Vista. Give 50,000 people device A and 500 people device B, and woah.. you’ll get more complaints about the reliability of Device A. Imagine that.
As for people who say “I’m running a quad core, 4 GB RAM, 8800 256mb video.. and it runs great!” — It just makes me laugh. Imagine how screwed MS would be if it *didn’t* run smooth on your very very high end PC’s? Mean while, the rest of us, who would be lucky to even have dual core, lucky to have ram over 1gb, lucky to have a 150 dollar video card, are the real people not enjoying the “Vista experience” whereas XP runs beautifully for everything we need a pc for at the moment.
For those who have actually moved on from XP, there is a new Vista Performance and Reliability Pack Unofficial Release for both x64 and x86 which can be found here:
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=41691
Once you have installed vista its hard to remove.I went to a technican who entered the bios to get rid of vista so we could reinstall xp.
@tony consider reading yourself twice before posting ,,, you make no sense
@tony
You were fed a line of bullshit by a cocky technician.
soon I will get the dual cpu quad core set up. but that will take some saving up. then finally, beos will reach its full potential on 8 cores.
BeOS hahaha
isnt that crap dead already (BeOS) ??
yeah it’s so dead and it’s sad because i use it and it works perfectly for me
seriously what are the advantage of BeOS (beeing a much older OS than current linux,unix,bsd distro) ? sorry for beeing BeOS noob lol
Why not try OS/2 ??? (sarcasm) loooool
Vista rocks and you all know it. you proberly dont know how to use it or just have a shit computer so stfu
the advantage of beos is that you can get away with using VLC player and play all scene releases up to HR.HDTV on 850mhz and everything else below it on a 500mhz. that’s what’s up.
@Mr. X
thx
“and the OS contributed $1.9 billion dollars of revenue towards Microsoft’s”
clearly the pirates are hitting them hard in their pockets
I dont think
Well said DSX.
@ DSX
You can easily get a computer that is capaple of running Vista perefectly without paying top dollar.