Hasamba-style Questions about Windows Vista Sales

It was publicized that Microsoft sold 40 million licenses of its Windows Vista OS. The question is if this is for real or not?

For real:

• Microsoft’s revenues during Q1 2007 were reported to be much higher than in previous quarters.

But more than 10% of those revenues are deferred income from the Software Assurance program, which is being recognized now.

Reasons to doubt whether those numbers mean much:

• The already publicized reason – it is not known whether those licenses represent PCs and laptops already sold to the public, or still in warehouses.
• How many developers received licenses as part of their MSDN subscriptions?
• How many licenses were disbursed at no extra cost to those, who paid for Software Assurance during the last few years?

And I still do not mention the question how many people tried Windows Vista and then switched back to Windows XP. In those cases, Microsoft already got the money for the Vista license, and the customer got several more gigabytes, with which to fill his bookshelf.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities. View all posts by Omer Zak