One response to “Microsoft: 60,000,000 Windows 7 licenses sold last year”

1. 

   Sethness February 5th, 2010 at 12:31

   Shouldn’t we learn from our mistakes?

   MS pads its figures every time it releases a new product, to make the premier look like a landslide victory. With Vista in particular, though sales were always sluggish and lame, MS used a variety of tactics to make the sales figures look big.

   For example, they counted all the sales to PC makers…all at once. PC makers were strongarmed into signing long-term big-bulk contracts to buy OEM versions of Windows to install on their as-yet-unmanufactured PCs, but MS counted all those sales as happening NOW.

   That’s like a restaurant signing a deal to buy a dozen eggs per day for the next year, and the proud farmer announcing that he’d sold 12×365 eggs in a single day.

   Further, understand that MS *needs* this to be a success. They’re tired of selling XP (Why, for gourd’s sake? Simple market saturation?) and want to revisit every user to tap our wallets again. MS’s need expresses itself in a lot of ways that fat, rich monopolies like MS use to play “800 pound gorilla”. It can cause an awful lot of industry “experts” to write favorable and fluffy articles. Remember two years ago, when so many reviewers went easy on Vista. The same’s happening, to a greater or lesser degree, now.

   Plus…heck, MS took WinXP off the market. It’s easy for Pa to find suitors for his daughter Ugly Betty when she’s the last woman on earth. I have to think, though, that a lot of users are playing with Win7 for a few seconds and then reaching for an old WInXP CD to UPgrade back to XP.

   MS’s sales babble cannot be taken at face value. Look under all those zeros for a big, fat hidden layer of hollowness. There you’ll find the real zeros.