Vista selling well!?
Whatever drugs Steve Ballmer is on they must be very, very good. That's the only explanation I can come up with for Ballmer telling the Australian press that he's "amazing pleased" with Vista sales.
Unlike arguing the virtues of XP vs. Vista, or, as has increasing become the discussion, Linux vs. Mac OS vs. Vista vs. XP, where personal preferences comes into play, no CEO could possibly be happy with their main product's sales if it were Vista.
Here are the cold hard facts. Microsoft reported on March 25th that its Windows sales had dropped 24% in the last quarter. For the same quarter, IDC said PC sales were up 15%. Now, I'm no financial wizard, but I do know a thing or two. Microsoft's Windows sales, to the best of my knowledge, have just suffered their hardest fall ever at the same time that PC sales were significantly up. This isn't just bad, this is absolutely horrible.
PCs selling well!?
Buy computer, be forced to get something you'll remove anyway. Some months ago less than 1% of businesses adopted Vista. Sold, not deployed.
Market is waiting ? Server 2008, vista, 7, and cloud computing ?
Vista in the computer stores are quite fast. Vista installed at home are not compatible with the hardware until SP2. We expect SP2 will have good garbage collection and virtual memory to compensate for power and speed, on your older computers. My WinME has garbage collection that is still being improved, as error reports(segmented modules got collected by mistake, crashed the OS) go to Redmond. Redmond needs to have memory protection on OS modules in virtual memory, only do garbage collection on webpage history. Logic is messed up by mouse acceleration for awaking sequential action(such as forgeting the number of framebuffer files or list) on segmented data.
Microsoft revenue is stable, but may be shifting to cloud computing, where new hardware will be using server 2008. IT departments may have to outsource to data centers to avoid huge investments in newer more powerful equipment and transmission lines(T4 with edgeQAM).
Originally, Microsoft wanted to have more revenue by acquiring Yahoo. Now the strategy is build cloud computing revenue, and support all older windows customers to use cloud computing.
Linux lovers are way behind in marketing studies; hence constantly changing versions that no one can use for every day computing. Versions may be interesting for the future development of Linux OS; but what do we use today? Common Vista users are not foolish self proclaimed Linux experts, that they will abandon Vista for Linux headaches. Besides they have Microsoft virtual administrator activity(auto-update) to keep factory installed Vista going. There are only about 150,000 Linux experts with over five years of experience; each one hacking linux distros of different flavours. No one can hack any or all Linux distros.
We are stockholders of Msft. Opinions here maybe biased.