Microsoft targets Vista sales in line with PC growth
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Microsoft Corp. said on Wednesday it expects to sell twice as many copies of its new Vista PC operating system in its first year on sale compared with the launch of its last major upgrade, Windows XP, in 2001.
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Ahead of Bill Gates' keynote Sunday night, Microsoft said that 100 million copies of Vista have been sold, but the new OS has little presence here at CES.
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US sales of computers carrying Microsoft's new operating system Vista soared in the week after it was launched, defying the expectations of analysts who gave Vista lackluster reviews.
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(InfoWorld) - The chairman of Acer, the world's fourth largest PC vendor, forecast the company's PC shipments will grow by as much as 50 percent year-on-year in the first quarter and 40 percent for all of 2007, the company confirmed on Tuesday. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang made the prediction on Monday at a Lunar New Year celebration, according to a company spokesman. The story was first reported in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News, which said the reasons for strong growth included stronger than expected shipments of PCs armed withÂ Microsoft's new Vista OSÂ and lower PC prices resulting from aÂ price warÂ on central processing units, the brains of a PC, between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The spokesman could not immediately confirm the reasons for stronger shipments, but said Acer is seeing brisk growth in emerging markets. The report that Vista is a major cause of Acer's strong PC shipment growth in the first quarter is important because it may be an early sign the new OS is taking off, at least in some markets. Microsoft launched the consumer version of Vista in 70 countries on Jan. 30, and since then its main comment on sales of the OS has been to warn analysts that their forecasts might be too aggressive. Other technology companies have given the OS a mixed review. Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract laptop PC maker,Â credited VistaÂ with record-breaking notebook shipments in January. But Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.Â (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip maker, said VistaÂ won't have much impactÂ on PC sales growth this year. The company is considered an IT industry bellwether due to the wide variety of chips it manufactures. The microprocessor price war between Intel and AMD has been going on for several months, and is a key to creating great bargains for users by lowering overall PC costs. The processor is the most expensive component in a PC. On Jan. 21, Intel released a new price list, slashing the price of some desktop CPUs as much as 69 percent compared to its previous price list, published in late December. AMD published a new price list on Feb. 20, also showing lower prices for certain processors aimed at desktop PCs, including dual-core Athlons, compared to its Jan. 22 price list. The price lists for both companies can be found on their respective Web sites, and all prices are for lots of 1,000 processors. The top global market for Acer products is Europe, while Asia ranks second for the company. In recent years, the company has put a new focus on China and the U.S. Â
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By Benjamin J. Romano, Seattle Times  Dec. 11--As Microsoft revs up the Windows Vista marketing engine, it's touting the economic boon the software is expected to bring to the rest of the technology industry.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange server -- by the end of 2007.
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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 posted solid growth in quarterly sales and profit on Thursday, buoyed by strong holiday sales of personal computers and video games.
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At his Sunday-evening CES keynote, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Vista licenses so far. The number requires some elucidation.
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Strong sales of new and old products alike led Microsoft to its fastest first-quarter growth in seven years with the company reporting growth in all five business segments and both revenue and EPS (earnings per share) that beat analyst expectations.
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Microsoft Corp.  launched Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday, unveiling the first major upgrade of its dominant operating system in five years and predicting that over 200 million people will run new Windows, Office or PC server software by the end of 2007.
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Microsoft Corp.  said it expects  sales of its Windows Mobile program in the Asia-Pacific region  to jump by over 75 percent in the business year to June, helped  by closer ties with wireless carriers and device makers.
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Sales of PCs with Vista Home Premium preinstalled comprised 70% of PC unit sales in the U.S. retail market, vs. 22% with the most basic version of Vista.
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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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By Ken Dey, The Idaho Statesman, Boise  Jan. 31--The long-awaited Microsoft Vista operating system went on sale Tuesday to consumers nationwide.
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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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Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations for both revenue and EPS (earnings per share) for its fiscal 2008 second quarter, attributing its strong quarter to sales of core client products, such as Windows Vista and Office 2007, as well as Exchange and SharePoint server software.For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Microsoft reported revenue of $16.37 billion, an increase of 30 percent year over year and a number that solidly beat the $15.95 billion in revenue that Thomson Financial analysts had estimated. Last year for the same period, Microsoft reported $12.54 billion in revenue.Diluted earnings per share were $0.50, an increase of 92 percent over the $0.27 in EPS reported last year, and $0.04 higher than Thomson Financial estimates of $0.46. Operating income for the quarter was $6.48 billion, an increase of 92 percent from the $3.47 billion reported for the same period last year.Microsoft&#39;s year-over-year percentage growth is higher than normal due to a deferral of $1.64 billion in revenue and operating income, as well as $0.11 of diluted earnings per share from the second to the third quarter of fiscal 2007. This deferred revenue contributed to the higher-than-average second-quarter percentage growth. Without these deferrals, second-quarter growth rates for revenue, operating income and earnings per share would be 15 percent, 27 percent and 32 percent, respectively, for the quarter reported Thursday.Ahead of Microsoft&#39;s announcement, analysts had expected the company to report a strong quarter even among economic uncertainty and fears that the U.S. economy is entering a recession.Microsoft&#39;s client business, on sales of Windows Vista, was especially strong in the quarter, with $4.34 billion in revenue compared to $2.59 billion in revenue a year ago. According to Microsoft, its client business has grown 20 percent on average since Windows Vista was made available nearly a year ago, and the company believes Vista began hitting its stride for adoption among customers and partners in the second quarter. According to Microsoft, it has sold more than 100 million licenses for Vista.Looking ahead to the next quarter, which ends March 31, Microsoft said Thursday that it expects revenue in the range of $14.3 billion to $14.6 billion; operating income in the range of $5.6 billion to $5.7 billion; and diluted earnings per share in the range of $0.43 to $0.45.For the full fiscal year ending June 30, Microsoft expects revenue in the range of $59.9 billion to $60.5 billion; operating income in the range of $24.2 billion to $24.4 billion; and diluted EPS in the range of $1.85 to $1.88.