Vista Ships 180m Copies In 18 Months Comments

180m is hardly impressive in that amount of time.

"A bitchy man might even say they do it better with XP, which – funnily enough – ties in with my view entirely... "

Guess I'm a bitchy man then!

Or do it for free on Linux!

Tbh, I'm tired of all the vista hating. I have it on my lappy and my dektop and it's brilliant and beautiful, doesn't crash and runs quickly.

It won't run on older computers, sure, but who with an old pc would want to? XP had exactly the same "problem", as did 98, and I remember the outrage of 95 making people's 386s obsolete.

Lies, damn lies and statistics...

Gordon - I wonder how many of those 180m are actually being used for physical Vista installs? Almost since Vista's release, we haven't been able to officially purchase XP licenses at work... we have to buy discounted "Vista Business Upgrade" licenses from MS instead. These allow us to legally install XP onto user's desktops from our existing media, but it also gives Microsoft a +1 in the Vista sales column every time we do - despite us not using Vista on a single machine across the ~500,000 odd in the company.

This has been happening across IT departments for months and months now. It's a pretty big marketing skew of the numbers, even by Microsoft's lofty standards.

A study of TR visitor OS might be a more reflective measure of how much Vista is out there.

Gordon hates Vista. It is getting a little tedious, basing Vista at every opportunity. I know it makes you an IT fashinista to behave this way, but for once could you do what we expect journalists to do and be objective? FWIW I find Vista very good indeed, and this is posted from my MacBook

@ Ed - I work for GE (General Electric) mate. Our IT/IM departments have a boat load of tasty hardware and systems... being a bit of a tech junkie, it helps keep me relatively happy there.

@ helidoc - I'll carefully sidestep around the obvious cheap counter-point to someone touting his MacBook whilst throwing jabs about IT "fashinistas", but aren't we all here seeking views on the gadgets and goods we will potentially spend our hard earned pennies on? That is what this place is all about, right?

Personally, I think that touch of personal opinion and informality some of TR's authors inject is the best thing about the site. I hope none of them close down their personal views to avoid offending some oddly fragile sensibilities. If I was just after a list of hard specs and a regurgitated summary dispassionately recited to me, I'd go have a nice chat with one of the vendor's support monkeys. ;)

To each, their own.

TR is all about seeking views, but:
1) Gordon's Vista bashing goes beyond an objective analysis of the product
2) It gets a bit wearing
3) It is currently fashionable to bash MS in general and Vista in particular, and it is disproportionate to what is deserved
4) Apple MB is good value on an Higher Ed discount