Thankfully, Windows Vista Runs Quite Well on an Intel iMac

Looks like Microsoft’s Windows Vista “express” upgrade strategy worked out quite nicely for the software giant. Nearly 40 million copies of Windows Vista were sold in the first 100 days following its debut, more than twice the number of copies of Windows XP over the same time period, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles yesterday. “I mean, we knew that Vista would become the standard version of Windows,” Gates said. “… But what’s happened in the last 100 days has been beyond our expectations. As of last week, we’ve had nearly 40 million copies sold, and so that’s twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release that we had. In our first five weeks, we’ve matched the entire installed base of any other provider of similar software” (take that, Apple …).

Forty million copies in 100 days. That’s quite an achievement. On the face of things. But given original equipment manufacturer (OEM) pre-installs, volume licensing and retail sales, is it really that impressive a number? What I’d like to know is this: how many copies were actually deployed? As Al Gillen, IDC’s research vice president of system software, notes “sold” does not equal “deployed.” Said Gillen, “If you went out and tried to find the portion of that 40 million that went into businesses, you will find a lot of the machines have been downgraded to Windows XP, which is perfectly legit.”