And his overly aggressive Vista predictions

Feb 21, 2007 14:09 GMT  ·  By

Leave it to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to put Microsoft's shares right on track and to present a positive perspective over the market performance of Windows Vista. Gates was asked to comment a statement related to the predictions for Vista in the 2008 fiscal year made by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

While attending a shareholder and Wall Street analyst conference in New York at the end of the past week, Ballmer told analysts to temper their "overly aggressive" Windows Vista forecasts. During the Financial Analyst Briefing - New York City, Thursday, February 15, 2007, Ballmer said: "I'm really excited on how enthusiastic everybody is about Vista. I, too, am very enthusiastic about Vista. But I think sometimes the enthusiasm about this great product and the excitement and the launch, people have to understand our revenue models because I think some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year '08 are overly aggressive."

In the aftermath of Ballmer's words Microsoft shares dropped 2.7%. "People who sell PCs have seen a very nice lift in their sales. People have come in and wanted to buy Vista," Gates stated at an Ottawa news conference.

Bill Gates also addressed the issue of Vista's impact in the first three weeks on the market. "Vista's had an incredible reception. The reviews have been fantastic. This is a big, big advance in the Windows platform. It's the world's most used piece of software... Overall, the reliability feedback has been well better than we expected."

In all fairness, while the reliability feedback might as well be better than Microsoft has predicted, the Vista sales are not. This because Steve Ballmer, on the same occasion as the operating system's launch, has revealed that Microsoft is expecting Vista to have an adoption rate double than that of Windows XP. But the fact of the matter is that Windows Vista has failed to outperform XP in terms of sales. However, Microsoft's shares did jump 9 cents after the comments from Bill Gates.