VISTA- Features and Benefits [Archive] - IDN Forums

Rubber Duck

30th January 2007, 03:40 PM

The US press has given Vista a bit of a drubbing, but frankly a lot of it is uninformed rubbish.

The estimate of 100M installations by the end of the year is nonsense.

To give you some idea Upgrade of XP in the first week accounted for only 300,000 installations. The lack of queues outside US stores in the middle of the night in January means absolutely nothing! Upgrade don't have that much impact.

There are about 850 installations of windows in the world. At least 20% of those are on machines that will be trashed by the end of the year and replaced with Vista. That is 170 Million straight away. There will be some upgrades at least 50Million, I would guess. Much of the volume is going to come from new users that have never previously owned a computer. As most of those come from outside the US this aspect will have been totally neglected.

We have seen the expontential rise in computer ownership in China. Expect this to be followed by similar in the Russia, the Arab World and India to mention just a few. Most of these new computers will have Vista, probably around 200Million of them. It is also clear that because computing in these countries is in its infancy this expansion will mean that in percentage terms the sales of Vista to total new users is going to have a massive impact.

The difference between Japan and these markets is fundamental. Japan needs to be converted. These other market are just waiting to be installed. Those that don't think Russia, the Arabic World and India are not going to account for a very large proportion of new installation have understood nothing.

You should expect that Vista will account for 50% of installations globally by year end. In many of our target markets it is going to be very much higher than that! And all this does not even count the impact that Auto Updates of IE7 will have!