Posted on 11/30/2012 8:52:10 AM PST by SeekAndFind
NPD research published some horrible news for Microsoft yesterday.
* Despite releasing an entirely new operating system on October 22 of this year, Windows PC sales shrank 21% between 10/21 and 11/17 versus the same period last year.
* Windows 8 tablet sales during that period were "almost nonexsistent" – just 1% of all Windows 8 sales.
“It hasn’t made the market any worse, but it hasn’t stimulated things either,” Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD, told the New York Times. “It hasn’t provided the impetus to sales everybody hoped for.”
No kidding.
Yesterday, we reported other bad news:
Asus CFO David Chang's comment that "demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now."
Microsoft cut its order of Surface tablets for the year to two million units, down from four million.
This is a very scary time for Microsoft.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Thanks. I want to keep my cable router and not have to go to a wireless.
Agree. People don’t like change so they complain.
RE: This is silly. Win8 sales are upwards of 40 million
The problem with that 40 million sales number is that it’s not very transparent.
Microsoft hasn’t explained how it’s counting licenses. Without that information, it’s a little hard to tell what that 40 million figure really means.
Many of those licenses could have been obtained before Windows 8 was even launched. A lot of companies bought the rights to Windows 8 before it was available and may now be in the license count even though they haven’t deployed Windows 8.
According to Rob Helm, managing vice president for research at Directions On Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash, a survey his company took of its customers, which are mostly large businesses, indicated adoption of Windows 8 would be slow. It showed that only 13 percent of the firms had plans for a company-wide deployment of new operating system in 2013.
Those survey findings jibe with observations made Wednesday by the CFO of Asus David Chang and Nomura security analyst Richard Sherlund, a widely respected Microsoft watcher.
Chang told the Wall Street Journal that the demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now.
In the long run, all this early speculation about Windows 8 adoption may be producing more heat than light on the subject. It’s just too hard to tell from one month’s experience. everybody’s trying to spot a trend based on one data point. It’s really too soon to tell. We’re all obsessed with instant analysis.
M$ business model was always based on monopoly.
Monopoly always works for a few decades, then eventually fails when either competition finds a way into the market or the entire environment changes and the monopoly’s product or sales model no longer makes sense.
RE: This isn’t windows 8 sales data first of all. This Is sales of PCs that includes the time before Windows 8 was even for sale.
Yep. All the sales figures are from October 26 until November 17. That’s 23 days of sales. Worst, it does not include Black Friday, when the Christmas shopping season kick off.
Also, If Microsoft says it sold 40 million licenses then it should be allowed to prove that. It is unlawful for a publicly traded company to lie about prospective sales because that could influence its stock prices.
“This is silly. Win8 sales are upwards of 40 million (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/windows-8-sales-40-million_n_2204935.html).";
It’s funny how they completely keep overlooking that in their deranged drive to somehow prove how awful Windows8 supposedly is.
To some degree true. However
1. Increasingly apps are being made multiplatform and in many cases are web based. In the PC world apps are less important then they used to be.
2. Ultimately if the OS itself sucks, users are going to become unhappy, developers are going to become unhappy and at some point you reach a tipping point. That’s ultimately my point here - after years and years of at best, mediocrity out of Redmond, the whole eco system and mindshare is shifting - and it may have nothing fundamentally to do with tiles.
I've rushed a couple of computer purchases just to avoid new versions of Windows.
The PC is not dying. How do people think all these neat mobile devices and tablets are programmed? Not on a mobile device or tablet.
Try running a debugger on a 7 inch screen with an on screen keyboard. Sheesh. Commercials on tv promoting all the social media advances are so obtuse and targeted for the “look at me” demographic. “The next big thing yada yada...” and it is some palm size gadget that allows to share your music playlist, big frickin’ deal. Heck even the smart phones are getting bigger than smaller.
For the people who only surf, waste time on fb and other social crappers, and post youtube videos of inane, stupid stuff, yes they don’t need a PC. For those that actually work they will need a keyboard and at a minimum a 17 inch screen (if not two), 8+ GB of RAM and a xxGB hard drive.
Attention follow up rant: Come to think of it I am sick of hearing about the cloud as well. Yeah let’s put all out data out of our control where any small thing denies us access and anyone can get to it. I do software design and I hate this crap, it is always the newer generation of “engineers” that want everything cloudy and install pant loads of plug-ins and extensions to get their open source crap to run. I look at the achievements made in the 30’s-80’s (aerospace travel for one) without massive computing power and I am sometime feeling we are moving backward. Most technology advances came from space and military research (even medical stuff) and now it is all deriving from what is best for sharing your life BS.
Ah I feel better.
Microsoft continues to make the same mistake, over and over, and over again.
They flat out refuse to survey their buying public to find out what they need and want from them, before launching new products (which they then attempt to force their public to buy).
Instead, the eggheads in Redmond think they know what products we need and want, better than we ourselves do. Being arrogant know-it-alls, is how you destroy a once successful company.
I wont go as far as you go, MS has done some very significant work on the OS since 1995, but a lot of what they have done are things behind the scenes that the typical user won’t notice much of a difference.
What I am saying is they are just no longer a tech driver... Microsoft hasn’t LEAD in well over 2 decades, its followed. MS’s model was never one of leading really.. much of the “innovation” MS is credited for are ME TOO..
They have a business model that is far too antiquated to EVER be a driving force in TECH ever again. Effectively their model is largely find something someone else is already doing and relatively successful at and either buy them out or copy it. Now back in the ancient days of technology, mid 90s and before, this model was viable. MS has market share and could push its version, no matter how crappy it was to an installed base of users... Technology cycles were often multi year things. So, you could revision yourself up to tolerable or acceptable over time...
That’s not how it is today, at least not in many areas of technology. I remember when the NCSA Browser/Internet came online and then Netscape and MS just wrote the internet off... then they realized their mistake and came up with their own crap browser... they iterated and pushed it into the enterprise and eventually took the top spot... but it took them years to do it.
Now look at them since... tHey are STILL trying that same business model.. but the problem is the cycles are far far shorter... They can’t “ME TOO” fast enough to play this game, by the time they get in, the markets are too mature and products too good to deal with their crap. (Zune anyone??) .NET??? 18 years later its still nothing but playing catch up with JAVA (Though few .NET developers know or even understand that .NET was nothing more than MS’s “me too” to Java.
The last major undertaking at least in consumer retail that MS has pulled that has been remotely successful was the XBOX and it burned BILLIONS in losses on first gen to get that foothold and in second gen finally showed profit and will likely do fine in the 3rd gen.. but that’s an industry with 6-7 year cycles... Most technology, particularly consumer technology is on 1 year cycles or less... MS can’t play me too, if it wants to be relevant... it can’t force its will into enterprise. 20 years ago MS could have come out with a phone or tablet and whether it was the best or not wouldn’t have mattered... now, thanks to the opening up of the stack from a data and software perspective, they can’t do that, they have to compete directly with the competition and beat established players at their own games and that’s nearly impossible to do unless you yourself are committed to DRIVING NEW TECHNOLOGY... and MS isn’t.
I am not saying they don’t do R&D or that there aren’t really smart people there.. there are. Its just innovation cannot be fostered in an organization that is being managed by bean counters.. The model that had served them will doesn’t work today, and Ballmer’s management has ensured that the passion for technology that drives most innovation will never be fostered within their walls.
They will continue to exist, they will continue to make money, but the days of MS being a driving force in technology are long long gone. Without a change from the top down, they will never return.
Windows 98 was pretty darn good for being an even numbered OS. I had to be pried away from mine with a crowbar.
I reluctantly went to XP, and quickly fell in love with it. I then went through the same withdrawal symptoms when my last XP dinosaur died.
I was nervous about Windows 7, but after playing with it on my wife's laptop, realized that it was familiar enough that the transition would likely be enjoyable. It was.
That said, I'm not ready for a new OS already. Win 7 is plenty adequate for my needs, and I don't compute on hand held devices anyway.
Here’s something many people haven’t realized: the Windows that runs on tablets (including Microsoft’s Surface) is Windows RT, not Windows 8. Those start-up interfaces may look the same, but they’re not. Windows RT can’t run real “Windows” software. Like iOS, RT software can only be purchased and installed from the RT store.
I can get a discount on a Dell tablet that contains a chip I worked on. It’s RT, so I’m passing. I’ll wait for an Android tablet.
When I first saw touch screen computers used in McDonalds I thought the kids were too stupid to operate a real computer. Now I realize, I was right.
Icons is a short cut for “Can't Read”
Touch Screens, where Illiterate Man meets computing.
Supposedly full-blown Windows 8 will be on Surface tablets sometime next year.
I am one of those that are picky about change. Change for the sake of security, capatability or stability is OK.
But change for the sake of changing how something functions to me is just not my cup of tea. MS has changed how operating systems are operated by user controls ever since Vista. The worse change came with I believe MS Office 2007, where all the controls changed. One had to completely relearn MS Office, and new office documents could not readily be opened in older versions.
I equate this to car companies having the steering wheel on the left side one year, then maybe the back seat the following, with let’s say the brake pedal in the trunk, gear shift where the rear view mirror is supposed to be, etc. No one would buy a car with such drastic changes, but when software companies pull the same crap, it’s gobbled up like candy.
I will be running XP as long as antivirus companies support it. I might go to Win 7 as I’ve heard it’s not bad. But what I’ve read about Win 8, no thanks. I’m too old for that crap.
If you’re gonna use Windows 8 RT with a phone or laptop using phone service you had better get the unlimited data package or you’re gonna be paying gazillions.
My bread and butter is email systems, and I’m still waiting to see the mythical open-source Exchange killer.
Whoa! Whoa!
I totally agree with you. But that’s server apps, not OS!
In my mind MS has a few Aces in the hole
1. Exchange.
2. Active Directory.
3. Gaming Platform.
While you are 100% correct, it doesn’t speak to the consumer OS issue. By extension it may go to the server OS issue, but even that not directly.
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