Study: Vista Will Add 50,000 Jobs in EU
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Likely aimed at allaying European Union fears, a Microsoft-commissioned study by research firm IDC indicates 50,000 jobs would be created across six countries in Europe as a result of Windows Vista.
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Microsoft said Thursday that it had surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue, while saying quarterly profits were up seven percent on brisk Vista sales.
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You mean someone's actually buying Vista? Microsoft made revenues of $13.76bn in the three months ended 30 September 2007, an increase of 27 per cent on the same period last year.â¦
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Status report notes compliance, but European Union continues to study Vista specs.
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The release of Microsoft Corp.'s   MSFT.O much-anticipated Windows Vista operating system will   drive $40 billion in economic activity and create 100,000 new   jobs in six European countries next year, a study said on   Thursday.
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Despite underwhelming consumers and being&#160;snubbed by enterprises,&#160;Windows Vista&#39;s numbers keep growing, with Microsoft&#160; saying Thursday that it has now shipped 88 million copies of the operating system, almost double the number of copies of XP in the same amount of time at its launch.In late July, Microsoft said it had hit the&#160;60 million shipment mark with Vista.Microsoft had previously said that it had&#160;shipped 20 million copies of Vista&#160;in its first month and 40 million copies of Vista in the first 100 days.Microsoft credited Vista with helping it&#160;beat Wall Street expectations&#160;and raise financial projections for the rest of the year. The company reported revenue of $13.76 billion for the first quarter ended Sept. 30, up 27 percent from the same quarter in 2006.Revenue in its client segment, which includes all consumer versions of Windows, was $4.14 billion, edging out the $4.11 billion in revenue from the Microsoft Business Division where Office is produced.CFO Chris Liddell credited strong sales in emerging markets, due in part to anti-piracy and legalization programs there.Client revenues, however, did not top those of the first calendar quarter this year, when Vista was officially launched. Revenues at that time were $5.32 billion.Three-quarters of the copies sold of Vista were higher-priced &#39;premium&#39; versions, compared to 59 percent of the copies of Windows -- primarily XP -- available a year ago.The 88 million figure mostly includes Vista-installed PCs bought by consumers and small businesses, as well as packaged copies of Vista sold in stores or online.It does exclude the tens of millions of Windows corporate volume licenses. There, many enterprises continue to hold off on deploying Vista, acknowledged CFO Chris Liddell, though he expects them to start deploying it when Vista Service Pack 1&#39;s arrival in the first quarter of next year.Nevertheless, revenue from companies renewing their volume licenses for Windows, which gives them the right to upgrade to Vista, was up 27 percent.Other highlights from the statistics:-- Unit sales of Windows Server&#39;s premium enterprise edition were up 35 percent year-over-year;-- A release candidate for Windows Server 2008 has been downloaded more than one million times in its first month;-- Unit and revenue growth of SQL Server were both up more than 15 percent;-- Halo 3 generated $330 million in revenue;-- Xbox 360 console unit sales increased 90 percent, driven by a price cut in August and Halo 3-related demand;-- Client revenues, including those for Vista, are expected to grow 62-64 percent year-over-year in the current fiscal Q2, or 13-14 percent excluding certain revenue deferrals in the prior year;-- Microsoft Business Division revenues, including those for Office, are expected to grow 15-16 percent in Q2 after normalizing for impact of technology guarantees and pre-shipment deferrals in the prior year;-- A beta version of Office Communications Server has been downloaded 80,000 times;-- There are 10,000 customers in the Customer Technical Preview (CTP) program for PerformancePoint Server, its new business intelligence offering.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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(InfoWorld) - In the first year of its release, Microsoft Corp. is expecting businesses to adoptÂ Windows Vista twice as fast as any other version of Windows, with 10 times as many Vista business seats deployed at launch than any previous release of the OS. Despite this optimism, analysts still don't expect businesses to begin adopting Vista in earnest until late 2007 or even 2008, with many waiting for the first service pack version of Vista before they begin considering an upgrade. One reason Microsoft is expecting Vista to be so successful is that the company has made a concerted effort to give customers the tools and training they need to adopt Vista across their businesses, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of the Windows Client Business Group at Microsoft. The company also put test versions of the OS into as many people's hands as possible. For the previous Windows migration, to Windows XP, Microsoft didn't release important tools to help businesses upgrade -- such as a compatibility toolkit to ensure existing applications will work -- until Service Pack 2, which was released nine months after Windows XP shipped, he said. However, with Windows Vista, "we made the beta of the [compatibility] toolkit available with Windows Vista Beta 2," Goldberg said. Microsoft also has opened up test versions of the OS to a wide audience, making Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available to the public. Microsoft expects that at least 5 million users will have access to Vista RC1, all of whom the company has encouraged to provide feedback about the release so it can be as polished as possible before it goes out to business customers in November. Another reason Microsoft expects businesses to warm to Vista early is that the company is doing its share to educate customers on how much money they can save by adopting it, Goldberg said. Microsoft has worked with analysts to develop customer case studies to see how much money business customers can save per PC by upgrading to Vista from their current OS. Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC, does not dispute Microsoftâs calculations for the return on investment (ROI) companies will make on Windows Vista, though he says that companies âdonât get the âRâ unless they put in the âIâ first.â âThe ROI story is exciting, but it requires that customers be mature and agile enough to do what they need to do afterwards,â Gillen said. And while Microsoft may meet its ambitious first-year goals for Vista, that momentum will likely peter out, once pent-up demand has been met, Gillen said. âEighteen months out, the adoption curve will look like any other Windows product,â Gillen said. âItâs hard to move corporate customers faster than they are willing to go.â Microsoftâs bullish projections donât appear to jibe with most current third-party customer surveys, such as one online survey of 314 IT professionals conducted by Computerworld in August. Just 17 percent of IT professionals say they are considering rolling out Windows Vista in the first year. Forty-one percent of respondents said they had no plans to roll out Vista, while 35 percent said they would begin testing Vista only after it ships. Of those who said they were considering rolling out Vista in the near or long-term, the largest group (29 percent) said the cost was the biggest determinant of if and when they would upgrade. That was followed by the hardware requirements (16 percent), the amount of employee training (6 percent) and the amount of IT staff retraining (4 percent). Even if Microsoft doesn't meet its goals for Vista, it's not likely to affect the company's revenue. According to one financial analyst firm, Microsoft stands to lose only about $400 million in revenue in fiscal 2008 if Vista business adoption does not go according to the company's plan, and $2 billion in fiscal 2009. In its most recent fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft reported more than $44 billion in revenue. While the company is optimistic about adoption in its marketing, it is being far more conservative in its financial estimates, analysts said. This is obviously good news for Microsoft, but there is a downside. The longer Vista is available, the more it will cost the company if businesses continue to hold off on adopting the OS. And any negative press or analyst feedback on lackluster Vista adoption could drive Microsoft's stock price down, analysts said. (Eric Lai is a senior writer at Computerworld.)
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General Motors Europe will chop 12,000 jobs over two years -- around a fifth of its workforce -- to lop 500 million euros ($673 million
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EMC's IPO of VMware could have far-reaching financial implications, including additional money for EMC to retain and hire talent, and a massive 50% market cap boost.
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With the European Unionâs (EU) expansion to 25 countries, it now accounts for 28% of world GDP and a market of 450 million. That closer commercial relationships with EU are desirable is obvious.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's wish that consumers purchase the premium versions of Windows Vista rather than the most basic version of the OS may be coming true, according to the findings of a research report released Thursday. Research from Current Analysis for the week ending Feb. 3, which covers the first five days Vista was available to U.S. retail customers, shows that sales of PCs with Vista Home Premium preinstalled comprised 70 percent of PC unit sales in the U.S. retail market, while sales of PCs with Vista Home Basic accounted for 22 percent. Windows Vista was released to consumers on Jan. 30. However, sales of PCs with the most full-featured and expensive consumer version of Vista, Windows Vista Ultimate, were lackluster in the first week, accounting for a mere 1.2 percent of PC sales. However, Samir Bhavnani, the Current Analysis research director who wrote the report, said he expects this will eventually change. "You can expect over time that Ultimate will become a bigger part of the overall mix," he said. The release of Vista boosted overall PC sales, giving the PC market the best week it's had in four years, Bhavnani said. PC unit retail sales increased 173 percent for the week ending Feb. 3 compared to the previous week, and were up 67 percent year over year, according to the report. And the increase occurred at a time when retailers weren't even promoting Vista to customers as much as they were promoting another consumer product, he said. "Most of the retailers last week were focused on selling HDTVs because of the Super Bowl," he said. This week, Vista has been more top of mind with retailers, so he said the strength of PC sales during Vista's first week should be sustained over its second week of release. Still, if Microsoft had gotten Vista to market before the busy holiday shopping season in November and December as originally planned, Vista would have had an even more impressive launch, Bhavnani said. Out of the PC vendors selling hardware that supports Vista, Hewlett-Packard fared the best in the first week, according to the report. HP accounted for a 54 percent share of Vista Home Premium sales and a 53 percent share of Vista Home Basic unit sales. The week prior to the introduction of Vista, which ended Jan. 27, HP computers represented 33 percent of all PC sales. As for the long-term sustainability of Vista PC sales, that remains to be seen, Bhavnani said. "We won't know the answer to the question until we look at the first half of this year relative to the first half of the year last year," he said.
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In an interview, Ben Fathi, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows development, said he thinks Windows Vista is on track to meet his goal of the new OS having half the flaws that Windows XP did in its first year.
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So go easy on us, OK? Microsoft is touting the contribution of Windows Vista to EC economics in its latest attempt to persuade regulators to go easy on the operating system.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - When MicrosoftÂ releases Windows VistaÂ to business customers in Europe on Thursday, it will be offering an extra version of the OS to comply with the European Commission's antitrust ruling against the company. In itsÂ 2004 decision, the Commission ordered Microsoft to release additional versions of Windows that comeÂ without its Windows Media Player software. The idea was to prevent Microsoft's dominance in the desktop OS market from giving it an unfair advantage over rivals like RealNetworksÂ and Apple Computer. That resulted in versions of Windows XP called "Edition N," which sold for the same price as the standard Windows XP. With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft is having to do the same again. The company was still working with the Commission to determine exactly how many N versions are required, but it expects to offer them for both home and business users, said Thor Windham-Wright, a spokesman with Microsoft's public relations agency. "To comply with the ruling, Microsoft will have to produce an Edition N for all future editions of Windows," confirmed Tom Brookes, Microsoft's spokesman in Brussels. Microsoft released Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Enterprise to its volume licensing customers on Thursday, along with Exchange Server 2007, its e-mail server product, and the Office 2007 productivity suite. The consumer editions of Windows Vista are due for release on Jan. 30. The main advances in Vista are better security, its revamped Aero user interface and, for businesses, features to help to reduce PC management costs, Microsoft has said. Critics have noted that there has been little support from PC makers for the "N" versions of Windows, undermining the effectiveness of the Commission's ruling. Most PC makers chose not to offer Windows XP PCs with Edition N, citing little interest from customers and the expense of supporting extra versions of the OS. The antitrust ruling also ordered Microsoft to release protocols used by its work group servers to allow competing software to operate more smoothly with Windows. It isn't launching the server version of Vista,Â code-named Longhorn, until late 2007, so the company doesn't have to submit the protocol information for it yet. âDocumentation for Vista work group server products would be needed when they do launch a Vista server system, but we donât require documentation from the Vista PC OS,â Todd said. If rival software manufacturers are unhappy about Vistaâs impact on competition and complain to the European competition regulator, Todd said the Commission will consider their complaints âon their merits.â It's hard to predict how the coming months will proceed with Microsoft's competitors and the Commission, said Michael Silver, research vice president with Gartner Inc. "I think as long as Microsoft is around and they're dominant they're going to attract companies that say they are being treated unfairly," he said. Enterprises in Europe will probably take longer to adopt Vista than those in the U.S., since European companies typically use their hardware and software longer, Silver said. Gartner predicts most organizations will test Vista for 12 to 18 months before widely deploying the OS. "Certainly, this is just a beginning," Silver said. But Microsoft was quick to promote early adopters. The Arsenal soccer club, which plays at Emirates Stadium where Microsoft is holding its U.K. launch event Thursday afternoon, is among those already using the new software, the company said. (Paul Meller in Brussels contributed to this report.) Â
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Microsoft Corp.  launched  Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday and said that by the  end of next year more than 200 million people would use the new  version of its dominant operating system or new office software  and server computer products.
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Microsoft  said on Thursday it  remained on track to launch its Windows Vista operating system  in Europe in January but again asked the European Commission to  detail concerns it may have with the software.
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NEW YORK/LONDON  - Microsoft Corp. rolled out Windows Vista at retailers in 70 countries on Tuesday, delivering a PC operating system that aims to better manage the explosion of digital media and protect users from the dangers of the Internet.