14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer has revealed that the company plans to ship an estimated 90 million licenses of Windows Vista by the end of this year. And the Redmond Company seems to be right on track to its goal having sold in excess of 20 million Vista licenses in just the first month of availability. As such, Microsoft has managed to match the internal forecasts for the market performance of the operating system that was predicted to outsell Windows XP by 2 to 1. And businesses hold part of the key to Vista's success.
"The adoption of Vista in the corporate market has not been slow. At least not relative to history or my expectation. This is important for people to recognize. Unless we do essentially a service pack, corporations, for good reasons, are notoriously 'slow' to adopt. There's a testing period, a validation period, etc., that people do go through," Ballmer explained.
Ballmer mentioned that Vista will continue to enjoy a rapid adoption within the corporate environment and gave as an example Citigroup Inc. According to Ballmer, Citigroup will upgrade all of its computers to Windows Vista. In the next 13 to 14 months, Citigroup will acquire and deploy over 500,000 copies of Microsoft's latest operating system.
"We have not seen any particular differences in uptake. I'm not arguing with the fact that it's not fast. I'm just saying it's not different. It's about the speed of past releases, and what we would have anticipated. There are places where people are not using it today, that's for sure. But certainly I'm involved with a number of accounts where I expect to see fairly brisk and early adoption," Ballmer added.