Windows Vista Sales Are Slower Than When Windows XP Launched
Although the consumer version of Vista saw tepid sales during its first week on store shelves, the new Microsoft operating system did seem to help PC sales. Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista at retail stores significantly trailed those of Windows XP in each product’s first week on shelves. Market research data showed that the number of copies of Vista purchased was nearly 59 percent lower than the number for its predecessor. Revenue was also down, but less dramatically, with the dollar value of first-week Vista sales off 32 percent from that seen with XP.
Sales may be hurt further by an IT professional who claims to have discovered a way of upgrading to a full version of Vista from scratch, while paying only the cost of an upgrade for an earlier version of Windows. As part of the Vista launch, Microsoft is offering Windows users a range of upgrades, allowing them to move to one of six versions of Vista without paying the full cost. These upgrades are supposed to work only on a PC that contains an existing copy of Windows. The key to the IT professional’s method is that the upgrade package contains a complete version of Vista, which the package can be encouraged to install on a machine without checking for an existing authorized copy of Windows.
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