Windows Now

> hey guys: WHERE THE HELL ARE THE SALES NUMBERS?!?!

They're there, but everyone's looking in the wrong place.  Back in 1995/8, PCs were luxury items; today, hardware is a cheap commodity.  These days, a lot of people who decide they want the Latest and Greatest MS OS who would have purchased a retail copy of Windows 98 will today just get a new PC with Vista preloaded -- and why not, when a new PC is probably several times the speed of their current one and costs not much more than a couple of copies of Home Premium bought at retail?

A little data to partially back that up: According to the WSJ, PC sales the week after Vista was released were 173% over and above when they were the week before (i.e. 273% *of* what they were before).  The article doesn't have any data of how long the heightened rate continued, but I'll bet it wasn't just for one week, and I'd be surprised if sales today aren't still noticably higher than, say, sales for the same period last year, due to Vista.

If you want an additional reason, the sales numbers are only for retail copies.  Back in 98 people buying a copy would have bought a retail copy in a local store.  Today, they go to Amazon, see the retail copy for $225, see the OEM copy for half that, note that they don't even have to buy a measly printer cable to qualify for the OEM one, possibly Google a bit and find out that the actual disc image is identical to the retail version, grin, shrug, and get the OEM version.  Evidence: on the current Amazon OS bestseller list, Home Premium OEM is *above* Home Premium full retail.  None of those copies are counted in the retail sales numbers.

So it's not as bad as it looks.

Personally I don't think the Live term should have ever been applied outside of the XBox eco-system.  XBox Live was the first exposure 99.9% of people had to the Live brand and any time I see it applied to anything else I have to step back and ask, "what in the hell does this have to do with Live?"

A service shouldn't be called Live unless it:

1. Interacts with your Live friends list

2. Sign-in is via your x-tag (gamertag, zunetag, etc.),

3. Allows access and/or management of the same account used on XBox Live/Zune Marketplace.

Regardless of what the Live brand was meant to be it now only has strong market recognition as XBox Live.  Instead of just slapping Live on everything Microsoft needs to fan the Live spark from the one place it's actually burning.