Vista Sales Lower Than Expected

In what comes as a complete shock, NPD reported that first week retail sales of Windows Vista were almost 60% lower than the first week retail sales of Windows XP back in 2001. Despite the millions Microsoft has dumped into a marketing campaign for Vista, it's been a while since they've released a product that had so few compelling new features.

I guess the problem is that Windows XP was just too good. Granted, XP has had it's problems, various security flaws, etc but when it comes down to it, XP is a good OS. By comparison to what was available previously, namely windows 98, XP was amazing. Now Vista has come along and Microsoft is trying in vain to convince consumers that it is worth another couple hundred dollars to upgrade. This was a much easier argument to make for XP. Users of Windows 95/98 knew the operating system was crap, you could see it on a daily basis. Most users were very familiar with the Blue Screen of Death, which had a nasty habit of appearing when you were almost done writing a long document that you hadn't saved yet. The promise of increased stability and productivity that XP offered made it an easy sell.

Making and argument for upgrading to Vista is much more of a challenge. Most computer users, who use their computer for email, Office, maybe some photoshop, etc could go on using XP for years without a problem. So why should they upgrade to Vista? Really, the answer is that they shouldn't. The new hardware requirements mean that Vista won't run on half the computers anyway and XP does it's job. Upgrading to Vista is just an unnecessary headache, especially since many driver and software compatibility issues still remain.

That is not to say that Vista is a failed product. Everyone will eventually end up running Vista, it will just take many more years than the execs at Microsoft have forecasted. Retail sales of Vista will likely remain slow for a while with very few upgrades and most of the sales coming from copies purchased with a new PC. Corporations are where most of Vista's sales will come from for the foreseeable future. Many IT departments will find the new security features available in Vista to be attractive to help protect their networks form viruses and such. As IT departments start switching their companies over, users will start to become more accustomed to Vista and will see more of a reason to switch to Vista on their home machines, or more likely purchase a new computer with Vista.

Future sales of Vista are going to be strongly linked to new hardware sales. Most individuals won't bother upgrading their existing computers and many corporations are likely to pass until their next upgrade cycle. As a result, look for Vista sales to be sluggish for at least the next couple of quarters.