Vista sells 20M copies in one month? Not so fast

Yesterday, we reported that Microsoft was puffing up its chest once again, claiming that it has sold 20 million copies of Windows Vista in just one month. That would mean that Vista is selling twice as fast as Windows XP did upon its release--which is, as you'll recall, exactly what Microsoft has been predicting all along. But wait, something is not quite right here; how can Vista be such a runaway hit when we still don't know anyone who has it? Leave it to those geniuses over at Ars Technica to find the missing piece of the puzzle: Vista's sales figures don't necessarily reflect consumers who have chosen to upgrade to Vista. That is to say that since Windows is the defacto standard for a pre-installed OS, a number of consumers have purchased Vista simply by virtue of purchasing a new machine. Crunching the numbers, Ars figures out that if you take into account the rise in PC sales from 2002 to the present, it's plain to see that the increase in total PC sales alone can account for this "doubling." No wonder they've been so brazen about their sales figures, eh?

For more on the debunking of Vista's sales numbers:
- see this Ars Technica article