14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has always been up for a little operating system measuring contest... The Cupertino-based company, in fact, not only is not backing up from comparison games, but it is actually inviting and performing them. And while the Mac computers are suggestively portrayed as superior to anything that the PC world has to offer in the Get a Mac video ads, for the sake of good marketing, Apple has not been shy of taking shots at Windows Vista either.
Microsoft made Vista available to businesses in November 2006, and then to the general consumers in January 2007. Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was initially planned to ship in the spring of 2007. However, the Cupertino-based hardware company found the right trade-off in sacrificing Leopard to the altar of the iPhone. As a direct consequence, Leopard was only launched on October 26. So, Vista had quite a head start. Almost an entire year considering the November 2006 launch.
According to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, at the end of its first year on the market, Vista has in excess of 100 million users. The figure was put forward at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show this January. Just ahead of the Macworld Conference & Expo 2008. Apple has not released the statistics for Leopard sales as of yet, but the company indicated that its latest cat pushed over 2 million units in just the first weekend. By comparison, Vista sold 20 million licenses in the first month. In addition, Apple sold no less than 2,319,000 Macintosh computers in its first fiscal quarter ended on December 29, 2007, a period which includes the release of Leopard.
On the same day that Microsoft announced record revenue of $16.37 billion for the past fiscal quarter, Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft, stated: "We are pleased with the progress of Windows Vista in the market." But Apple has also experienced a strong quarter with revenue of $9.6 billion. "We're thrilled to report our best quarter ever, with the highest revenue and earnings in Apple's history," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.