Doubts cast over Vista sales figures

PC Equipment | 11 Aug 2008 : A senior executive at Hewlett Packard has said that sales of systems of Windows XP still make up the majority, despite the operating system being officially withdrawn from sale in June.

Jane Bradburn, market development manager of commercial notebooks for HP Australia, said the company was still selling XP machines, but issuing a Vista licence for them. This casts serious doubts over claims from Microsoft that Vista is selling well.

"From 30 June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," she said. "However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."

This would mean that in Microsoft's books the sales would show up as a sale of Vista.

Rob Kingston, group manager of commercial product marketing for HP said: "Looking into a
rystal ball, I don't think businesses will see much value in upgrading to Vista until late next year and, even so, Microsoft will probably have come out with something else by then."

The news backs up work by Forrester Research analyst Thomas Mendel, which estimates that only 8.8% of enterprises have adopted Vista. This led to an angry response from Microsoft on its Vista blog, claiming that it had sold over 180 million copies of Vista.

Quentin