December Vista sales strong

The sales statistics for December, Windows Vista's first month of public availability, are in and I must say, they're quite encouraging. As it turns out, first month sales of Vista are 62.5 percent higher than first month sales of Windows 2000. Vista still trails Windows XP in first month sales--but only by a measly 3.7 percent. What does it all mean? "Although Vista dollars were slightly lower than XP dollars in its first full month, I consider Microsoft's December results to be very impressive, given the commercial-only 'soft launch' approach that Microsoft took with the OS," said NPD analyst Chris Swenson. "Sometime after January 30, when Microsoft makes Vista available to the general public and ratchets up the marketing campaign, I suspect that we will likely see sales of Vista in the commercial channel begin to meet or surpass levels previously set by XP." NPD may be a little optimistic here (Forrester, for example, is far more conservative when it comes to Vista projections) but there's no denying that Vista sales were strong in December. However, Microsoft still has a long way to go before they make good on their earlier boast that Vista will deploy twice as fast as XP did.

For more on Vista sales:
- see this Ars Technica article