Microsoft Q1 Financial Results

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Infamy79 said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

^^
No, it's different, simply no one will RUN to upgrade. Sooner or later most will, but don't expect people to upgrade XP systems that still do their job without problems. Win 7 is anyhow in a better situation than Vista, as delaying the upgrade isn't as bad for MS as refusing Vista whenever possible up to updowngrading it to XP.

How can you qualify that statement given Microsoft have already deferred close to US$2 billion dollars in Windows 7 presales to its Q2 financials(only preorders until Sept 30th) and there are articles from Amazon saying its their biggest grossing preorder of all time.

It looks to me like plenty of people are RUNNING to upgrade

Looking around in various forums, blogs, etc, unsatisfied Vista users are the most eager to upgrade. Those deferred $2billion obviously include OEM copies, but even if they were only for upgrade licenses, it would mean preorders in the ten million order of magnitude, that's one-figure percentages of total XP users. But it could more easily be two-figures percentages of Vista users.

Obviously, as Vista is so hated and Win 7 is an evolution ironing out its most serious flaws, it's quite a safe bet that Win 7 will almost monopolize preinstalled market in little time, but this doesn't change the fact that MS would really like to get some more money from that 1billion XP users, but only a very small part of them will open their wallets and make Ballmer happy in the short term.

You are right that this won't prevent Win 7 from having a lot more success than Vista, but MS' wish to convert XP users ASAP is a totally different thing.