Ballmer claims Win 8 sales strong, WinPhone to follow Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off his company's annual Build developer conference on Tuesday by highlighting the new features of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, arguing that they represented an unprecedented opportunity for developers. "Certainly I'm enthused – as enthused as perhaps any moment in our company's history – …
They're selling lots of upgrades because they priced it at a reasonable level. $40 isn't too much to pay for a legitimate license to play with a very risky OS.
The real test will be when the price goes up to it's "normal" level. I'm willing to bet their sales numbers will plummet at that point.
Microsoft's Windows Upgrade Offer site (windowsupgradeoffer.com) is only meant for people who've bought a PC in the last month or so but it asks for no proof of purchase and only asks where you bought the PC and what model it is. So providing you wanted to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, you could do so easily for £15 instead of the usual retail price through the store.
It wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of people are taking advantage of this "loophole". It seems so slack that I have to wonder if its not a deliberate ploy to boost sales.
Whoopeee!!!!!
So I pop down to my local (PC World), lift up a so-called qualified Windows PC and write down the model number (well actually I take a photo). I go to this wacky site and enter in all the info and Voila!!, I can get new Windows 8 for £14.99. Would I want to run this on perfectly good hardware that can run Windows 7 perfectly well? Or any other operating system very well for that matter?
NO!!!!
This might be classified by Microsoft as a 'genuine' purchase but for such a measly amount, I am sure many people will get it 'just to see if it is worth it'.
I believe it is a definite ploy by them to boost their sales figures.
I can get Windows 8 for free via my institutions DreamSpark license, but could not be arsed.
Got mine last night, using the amusingly titled (and fictional) "Uncle Bubba's SupaDupa PC Emporium" as the vendor, where of course I had purchased the MONSTRO 9000 model.
£15 later and it's installed on my spare SSD, and terrifying me by downloading pictures I had forgotten I had uploaded to a Skydrive equivalent in 2007...
Buy your copy today!
It doesn't have to be because Windows 8 has had a rough ride in the press.
Apple sold the Mountain Lion upgrade at £13.99. The one before that was similarly pocket change.
The upgrade to 7 Pro was about £190 IIRC
I'm not a marketing guru but I'd say that if Apple are making you look expensive, you have issues. Further Apple do not have too many problems getting people to take their latest platform. This means they can feed their latest stuff to users more easily (app stores etc). Microsoft in contrast have had some fairly big problems moving their user base ever since XP making pushing other (more profitable) products that depend on new OS features harder. Remember that there are a large number of people out there who still answer 'Office 200X' when asked what OS they are using. This is not because they are idiots it is because 'the OS' is irrelevant to their lives. If you want these people to upgrade then you should remove any stumbling blocks (like large price tags).
So today Microsoft are offering a legitimate upgrade 'for a limited time only' from XP Vista or 7 to 8 Pro for £25 no petty fraud required.
I'm not sure I would want to replace my windows 7 install with 8 (giving me 'features' I'm pretty sure I don't want on my current hardware) even at pocket change. I am tempted by the stuff under the hood but from what I gather the new OS has a split UI personality disorder...
"I am tempted by the stuff under the hood but from what I gather the new OS has a split UI personality disorder."
It certainly does.
But my reasoning was, getting a couple of upgrades for 30€ a piece was worth it for Bitlocker and Hyper-V alone, so I could live with a the split UI disorder. And most importantly, the fairly small investment also means, that I'll only lose relatively little if I decide to fall back to 7.
We will have to see how it pans out.... As a desktop OS I think windows 8 takes some getting used to and the first impression for almost everyone is I hate this and I want it gone from my life immediately. If you actually take the time to use it for an extended period of time it is actually surprisingly good.
The integration moving forward is going to be really cool, especially once a new xbox is released that includes bluray (xbox 720?) who can forget the MS Fail of HDDVD Drives!!! Syncing data from your pc to your tablet, phone and console expecially when the console is a center piece of your living room is not to be sneezed at.
Keep on hating apple/android fanbois (seems there are a lot of you on this site) at least MS is forging forward with a great concept, heres to hoping they execute.
Getting used to it won't bring back the hundreds of small but destructive changes they made to discourage desktop use. So maybe people will get used to it - but they'll be getting used to an inferior desktop experience.
I personally don't like Win7 but even I can't imagine why a desktop user would downgrade to the gimped Win8 desktop. XP and to some extent Win7 were very customisable and didn't go out of their way to block 3rd parties providing that customisation. Win8 does.
FFS Win8 will actually let you customise a fair amount of window decoration. But only in high contrast mode and that gratuitously disables a different set of customisation. So you can't actually make the damn thing look any better, can't reconstruct the visual clues to gui elements without further gimping other things. It's deliberate, cynical and abusive.
"I personally don't like Win7 but even I can't imagine why a desktop user would downgrade to the gimped Win8 desktop."
I fail to see what's gimped about it? It is pretty much the same desktop as earlier, except the Start menu is now larger, much cleaner, and easier to navigate.
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one of the 670 million Windows 7 PCs and I see no outstanding, or compelling reason to upgrade.
Heck my idea of an upgrade is to stick a non-m$ operating system on a PC
No doubt at some point I'll have a win8 machine, but in all likelyhood that will be in 4-5 yrs time at which point windows 9 will be out anyway.
Coincidentally enough, I did a search on ARM-based PCs today to get a feel for what's available. Apart from the Toshiba AC100 smartbook (which got rightly "slated", though it might be somewhat redeemable with the right software upgrade, which might mean upgrading to a proper Linux distro) or the ARM-based Chromebook (same story, though who wants ugly branding plastered on their laptop, or inability to completely remove the incumbent OS?) it seems like the only viable competitor in this field is the Raspberry Pi.
How ironic would it be if the Pi actually out-sold the surface tablets? Answers on a postcard, please (unless you're Alanis Morissette, in which case, go back to school, buy a dictionary, whatever)....
Google/Samsung have gone to a lot of trouble not to give their best laptop a name. "The new Chromebook" is going to be really confusing when the newer chromebook is released. I mean the series 3 Chromebook with the ARM CPU that is half the price of the Intel ones. It is model number XE303C12.
Here is how to install Ubuntu on an XE303C12:
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook
The instructions put the Ubuntu on an SDHC card, but you could put it on the internal eMMC chip by typing different device names. Someone has reported success with openSUSE. I will be installing Debian this weekend. The bumps I expect to meet are:
Samsung's kernel will work fine. Debian's default kernel will probably be missing some device drivers. I expect compiling the latest stable kernel will fix most of that and the rest will get fixed within about two stable kernel releases.
The hardware should be able to run armhf, but I suspect armel will be easier to get working. armhf uses the floating point hardware, but armel does not.
The opengl library is not open source. The vendor supplied one will be either armhf or armel. The Mali 200 and 400 GPU's are being reverse engineered (see project Lima). The XE303C12 uses Mali 600.
Why would it be ironic for a what's basically an ultra cheap development board to outsell a fully specified tablet computer. They cost vastly different prices and are intended for vastly different markets.
Of course the Pi will outsell the surface, there would be something seriously wrong if it didn't. Do you know what irony is?
You are Alanis and ICMFP.
Well it would be an example of cosmic irony, if nothing else. A software company that spends millions, if not billions, on advertising, telling us how easy their "PCs" (well, PC OSs) are to use and they'll make us more productive and so on, losing out to a non-profit venture that's interested only in the educational market and uses (horror of horrors) Linux on their kit computer.
Upvote for claiming your five pounds, though I am not Alanis :)
If PC sales remain flat there will be 400M new Win8 devices this year? But there are only 670M Win7 devices? Is it just me or do those figures not seem to stack up? Or are they including a forecast of 300M Win8 phones in the 400M?
Paris because I'm assuming I am having a Paris moment and someone will explain how these figures do stack up.
Anything Balmer says I would take with a pinch of salt.
They KNOW there is no way to prove one way or another if his claims are true, and they aren't gonna say it flopped are they.
Microsoft are in trouble. Man on the street doesn't know and doesn't care about Windows 8, Surface or Windows Phone.
THAT WE KNOW...
"Microsoft are in trouble. Man on the street doesn't know and doesn't care about Windows 8, Surface or Windows Phone.
THAT WE KNOW..."
I'm guessing that if you actually got out on the street and asked people, more know about, and indeed care about, Windows stuff than Ubuntu. Or any other Linux, for that matter. So despite the shouting, I really doubt you do know. Unless you were waiting for one of your Linux User Group mates to come over and collared him as he approached your drive ...
Sorry Mr Ballmer, but your Win 8 OS looks too much like a damn Android screen. I HATE ANDROID ! Add to that the fact that Vista and Win 7 cannot remember the location and size of the last window a program used (XP could) - it doesn't inspire much hope for the future of MS. Plus WIN 8 will require dedicated Win 8 only programs (like I-Phones) - major FAIL. I'm sticking with WIN XP - the last version of Windows that worked fairly decent. Sure, MS no longer supports Win XP, but can you call Win 8 an improvement ? Cos I don't.
Put on the thigh-high waders - the BS at MS will be getting deep. It's a foot deep now, and climbing.
"Win 8 OS looks too much like a damn Android screen."
Or as Jim Carey might say...
Sorry, I call shenanigans.
According to Ballmer, in the three days since the formal launch of Windows 8 and Surface on Friday, Microsoft has sold four million Windows 8 upgrades
Gosh, that’s impressive. That’s even more than Mountain Lion, which only managed 3 million in the first few days. Until you compare the user base, and realise that Win 8 has only manage to excite a pathetic few.
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