News - Microsoft Windows 7 boxed-unit sales thrash Vista's

[Noli]

I bought two copies of 7 at £45 each in the first round of preorders. That's up from zero copies of Vista.

If my calculations are correct, that's an increase of infinity% in terms of units and revenue, what are Microsoft worried about...?

For this and other 'special' maths lessons please send a Western Union transfer c/o the (lately deposed) crown prince of Nigeria.

Yeah I wish I'd bought more than one copy at £45 so could install on friends & families' machines as well as my own (and no, unfortunately the £150 x3 upgrade pack is not interesting to me as want clean installs rather than messy upgrades - or could I do clean installs from my disc and use the licence keys from the family pack?) I imagine home premium is not going to drift below £75 for quite a while....

[wombar]

Bought a copy of Professional (wanted XP mode in case I needed it) for £90 on pre-order and a copy of home premium for one of my laptops (~£45). I would never dream of buying the retail packs for their RRP, just too expensive.

Overall I'm very impressed, and I'm pleasantly surprised that most of my apps/hardware worked (once I switched back to 32 bit). I'm still waiting for my free upgrade from Dell for my other laptop, but as soon as it arrives, Vista is getting nuked.

I never got on with Vista, but Win7 just seems less irritating all round

[GaryRW]

So... Lower retail price = More Sales + More Profit. Lets hope other companies follow up with great promotional offers, especially those who claim they have been hit hard by piracy.

I guess there's an argument to say that the low prices + higher sales volume now could mean lower sales volume in the future e.g. the lower prices just prompted people to upgrade/buy immediately rather than waiting for the price to drop.

Personally, I think it's the opposite - the lower prices are directly responsible for increased sales volume, and a very large percentage of those sales are indeed extra sales rather than earlier sales.

Would you pay £100+to upgrade from vista to Win 7? I know I wouldn't. But would you pay around £50???? that's far more tempting in my eyes.

[cheesemp]

I started using Win7 when it went RTM on MSDN 3 months ago. On the whole its so much better than XP, i now hate using XP. Saying that I felt the same way when I use Vista (With 2gb+ RAM)/Ubuntu/Fedora - XP just feels so long in the tooth. Its so nice to get copy dialogs that let you choose between two identically named files (including rename!!!!!). Just got to wait tell my company upgrades (which at the usual rate will be when Win 9 is out!).

[Funkstar]

Its so nice to get copy dialogs that let you choose between two identically named files (including rename!!!!!).

And not forgetting the more info with no. files left and transfer rates

[nightkhaos]

And not forgetting the more info with no. files left and transfer rates

The time remaining doesn't impeded copy performance. For short copies it doesn't even attempt to caclulate a copy time because it assigns it to another thread.

[chis]

Your missing out It really is good.... And for free its certainly worth a try.

Agreed, though it's not perfect... Win7 is still slower to start up out of the box than XP on the same hard disk (believe me, I've tried), but not by much. An SSD would sort this out.

I like to have the best of both worlds, two workshop PCs and my "TV" PC have Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10) and it's just as pleasant to use as Win7. Until I'm able to run Ableton, Paint.NET and Daz3D under Ubuntu, however, Win7 looks like the OS my main workstation will be running for quite some time.

[scaryjim]

'Only' in the sense that boxed-unit sales were up 3x this amount.

One would expect revenue to be at least 2x, right?

Yeah, OK, the unit sales increase was outstanding, and comparitively speaking the revenue increase looks meagre, but an 80+% increase in revenue is still *huge*, and I think speaks volumes for how well Microsoft have handled the release of Windows 7. It's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that the pre-order prices were "right", though, and I'll be interested to see how much sales drop off as the retail prices return to RRP - they're *already* high enough to put me off buying any more copies...

[Animus404]

£45 for software I'm going to use almost everyday for at least the next 3 years, I think that's a bargain.