Story: Vista shifts 20 million copies

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Vista still doing better than expected

You're right - considering the growth in the number of PCs it isn't selling as fast as XP but it is still doing better than expected considering other factors.

XP has been out there a long time and people are happy with it. It's not like the flakey USB support in win98 or dodgey everything in WinME which means people were dieing to upgrade. XP is still a solid OS.

Also the price. When I got XP Pro it cost about £180 retail and £110 OEM. Vista Ultimate is about £360 retail and £120 OEM. As most people will be getting retail it means off the shelf the price difference is a put off. Obviously there are lower priced editions but who wants a cut down version when your current OS is doing it's job just fine.

The other major contributing factors is Apples anti-vista campaign, and the general Anti Microsoft atmosphere that seems to be going round. This maybe because Microsoft is fighting too battles on too many fronts - taking on Sony with the xbox, Apple with the Windows/Zune/Windows Mobile and Norton/McAfee with OneCare. I think Microsoft have better products in the Console and Mobile categories but despite this may not come out on top. Conversely Apple may arguably have the better OS prior to Vista and may again when Leopard comes out but Microsoft is till likely to win that battle.

I think once people start using Vista they will never want to go back. I didn't fully understand what made Vista good despite reading about a lot of the features until I actually started using it on a daily basis. Now when I use a XP system I feel my hands are tied as things take longer to do or are just not as slickly implemented.

Vista doesn't have all the features I hoped for like WinFS but I think a drastic change in the file system like that would be too confusing for users to make the transition. Vista is a nice stepping stone to get used to tagging, stacking, search and relationship based locating of documents for when the next edition comes with hopefully a full fledged WinFS file system.

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