Windows 7 set to break sales records (Win 7 more popular than final Harry Potter book)

The Times, UK ^ | October 22, 2009 | DSGi,

[SmokingJoe]

Probably one of the reasons why MSFT shot up by 5% on Friday, despite the Dow falling by 1%. Going to be interesting to get the first 3 months Win 7 sales figures, when MSFT's fiscal Q2 earnings report come out in January.

[2harddrive]

Oh Thank Heaven, for Windows 7!

[Sir Clancelot]

Sales of 7 have been good because Vista was such a disaster. MSFT should pray that 7 is truly better than Vista. Time will tell.

[VanDeKoik]

Wow!

It’s almost like the frenzy with Windows95, except people aren’t waiting in line at stores at 12am.

[VanDeKoik]

“At midnight, queues could be seen outside stores as computers users got ready to upgrade their PCs to the new system as soon as possible.”

Oops, I guess it is.

[Dustbunny]

Wow, $119. for the home Windows 7 Upgrade. I want it but I will wait a while to see if there are problems.

[SmokingJoe]

Vista actually sold faster than XP did. Only thing is, the PC market was much bigger when Vista came out than when XP came out. Of course lots of firms chose to stick with XP, which in turn is going to make XP to Win 7 upgrade sales pretty high, plus the super low $30 price for students is going to make win 7 an impulse buy and boost sales too.

[colorado tanker]

Yep. Betcha this thing is selling because people are really anxious to dump their Vista.

[freedumb2003]

Best Buy is offering a 3-system home upgrade for around that.

[big'ol_freeper]

There's a sucker born every day.

Ah, yes. Indeed it is so.

[wombtotomb]

Is that $30 price only for college students, or can homeschooling students enrolled in an online school/college get it as well?

[Dustbunny]

That was the Amazon price. We live in an area where there are no stores such as Best Buy. In fact the closest Walmart is over 50 miles away.

[Sir Clancelot]

First Millenium, then Vista, perhaps MSFT should offer 7 for free, sort of as an apology to the PC world.

[Gone_Postal]

Win 7 more popular than Barry Obama
what will the media do now... Oh My....LOL

[RichardW]

I installed three copies on my three home computers and it went perfectly. Now upgraded. I must say that I never had that much of an issue with Vista but I wanted to keep current. It will probably be a huge success although it will have to be adapted to the large number of netbooks on the market. Most of these come with XP and this is not a direct upgrade.

[SmokingJoe]

College students. But in practice, anyone can get it, so far as you know someone who had a .edu email address.
Microsoft has deliberately made it easy for people to buy Win 7 cheap so they can sell more copies. Kinda like how they had these low priced “student editions” of Microsoft Office, which practically anyone could buy.
Someone started a thread here about getting a .edu email address, if you don't have a child in university.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2369537/posts

[PackerBoy]

I like Vista. Not a huge step up from XP in terms of features, but tons more reliable. I will wait to see how 7 goes over before I commit to an upgrade.

[freedumb2003]

Looks like Best Buy and Amazon are matching each other — the price is identical now.

I think there were early purchase price incentives.

The single user Home upgrade is $119 — the 3 user Home upgrade is $149.

[brivette]

I don’t think you can go from xp to win 7, I’m not an expert.

[SmokingJoe]

“I must say that I never had that much of an issue with Vista but I wanted to keep current.”

Vista had quite few device driver/app compatibility issues when it first came out. However, SP1 and SP2 pretty much fixed the issues.

” It will probably be a huge success although it will have to be adapted to the large number of netbooks on the market. Most of these come with XP and this is not a direct upgrade.”

Most netbooks are going to continue to come with XP for the next 12 months at least, because MSFT charges only $15 to OEM’s for XP on a netbook, but then wants to charge higher for Win 7, which netbook makers are not ready to pay for netbooks that they sell so cheaply.