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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Though unit sales for Vista's launch week as estimated by NPD were 58.9% lower than Windows XP's in October 2001, the way NPD tabulates its launch week data - the methodology for which NPD confirmed to BetaNews this afternoon - indicates that retail unit sales of Vista may actually be 25% or less per day during Vista's launch week than for XP's.
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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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By James Coates, Chicago Tribune  Feb. 11--Last week, Microsoft Corp. marketers and sales reps descended on Chicago to talk up the company's new product and boast about how the Vista operating system's huge "footprint" is about to stomp on Illinois.
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Though unit sales for Vista's launch week as estimated by NPD were 58.9% lower than Windows XP's in October 2001, the way NPD tabulates its launch week data indicates that retail unit sales of Vista may actually be 25% or less per day during Vista's launch week than for XP's.
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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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A Microsoft-sponsored study says that Windows Vista will generate some $70 billion in revenue and create up to 100,000 jobs in the first year of its release. The report also forecasts rapid and widespread adoption of the OS.
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After five years of development and repeated delays, Microsoft is releasing its Windows Vista operating system for sale to corporate customers tomorrow.
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The keyboards, mice, Webcams and headsets sport features for the upcoming Vista operating system.
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As expected, the PC industry is ready with new Vista computers after years of delays. But the immediate impact on the PC market could be muted.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O will most   likely ship its upcoming Windows Vista operating system on time   and meet its deadline for both corporate and retail consumers,   a Wall Street analyst said on Wednesday.
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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 that it expects Windows XP to make up a significantly larger part of sales in the coming year.
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Four months after the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft's claiming that 40 million copies have shipped -- but even Microsoft's not claiming that 40 million PCs are humming away with the new operating system. Computerworld.com gets to the bottom of the claims.
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Microsoft's memory-hungry Vista operating system, along with falling DRAM prices, boosts semiconductor sales.
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Nearly half of businesses are in some phase of preparing to update desktops to Windows Vista with small businesses moving the fastest to implement the OS, according to a new report released Monday.The number of organizations evaluating and testing Vista increased from 29 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent by early November 2007, found the report, commissioned by reseller CDW and based on information collected by Walker Information from 772 IT decision makers. Moreover, about 35 percent of companies are currently implementing or have implemented Vista already, compared to 12 percent last February, the report said.The report is the third of a wave of reports on Vista adoption that CDW has done since the OS was in its final testing phases in October 2006. In the latest phase of release, which tracked Vista adoption from October 31 until Nov. 7, 2007, small businesses comprised 53 percent of those companies either using or evaluating Vista. The higher-education segment came in second, with 49 percent reporting that they are evaluating or using the OS, while medium-to-large businesses were third, with 48 percent.Because of lingering hardware and application compatibility issues between existing company IT assets and Vista, CDW still advises customers to move to Vista on a case-by-case basis, said David Cottingham, director of product and partner management at CDW. In the case of small businesses, they may not have the application or hardware dependencies on Windows XP that larger businesses have.&quot;There are still definitely concerns when you get into custom applications in industries that will run on XP,&quot; he said. &quot;If [companies] have custom applications that don&#39;t run on Vista yet, they&#39;re going to stay on XP.&quot;CDW is still selling both XP and Vista, but Cottingham said the company does not have data on which version of the OS is selling more now that Vista has been available to businesses for more than a year. In September, Microsoft had to extend the OEM&#160;license for XP for five more months through June 30, 2008, because of customer demand for the OS. Microsoft had planned to stop selling XP through OEMs and retailers on Jan. 31.For its part, Microsoft has made strides to resolve compatibility issues with updates to Vista, and the numbers from CDW&#39;s survey seem to reflect that. In February, 50 percent of companies said they were buying additional hardware and software assets to migrate to Vista; by November, that number was down to 44 percent.Many believe it&#39;s inevitable that any businesses currently running XP will eventually move to Vista; it&#39;s just a matter of when. The release of Vista SP! (Service Pack 1), which is scheduled to be generally available by the end of March, should serve to increase the numbers of companies adopting Vista. Microsoft issued on Friday a public refresh of the first release candidate for SP1, which suggests the software update will be in its final release according to schedule.However, there is some belief among industry watchers that if Microsoft releases the next version of Windows, code-named Windows Vista 7, by its target of late next year to early 2010, some businesses may opt to skip Vista and move directly from XP to Windows 7 instead.
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NEW YORK/LONDON  - Microsoft Corp. rolled out  Windows Vista in 70 countries on Tuesday, delivering a PC  operating system able to better manage the explosion of digital  media and enhance Internet security.