Case Update

PC World.com traffic segments in 2007 by month: Vista (red line) vs XP (green line). Note that Vista was released on January 30, 2007. B

In the final sentence of the Vista section of the Microsoft in 2005 case, Yoffie and his co-authors mention predictions by some that Microsoft “could have a tough road ahead” with respect to the implementation of its newest OS.⁴ These suspicions turned out to be correct. PC World reported that as of January 2008, a year after Vista’s release, only 14% of its traffic came from machines running Vista, with 71% of its visitors running XP⁵ (see above). By comparison, XP comprised 36% of the site’s traffic one year after it was released.⁵ Resistance to Vista can also be seen in the corporate world. A March 2008 survey of 2200 corporate computer users found that only 8% of those who used Vista reported being “very satisfied” with it (compared to 40% and 53% “very satisfied” responses in the XP and Mac OS X shares, respectively).⁶ Apple quickly capitalized on these stats by running an ad campaign mocking Vista's lackluster sales and numerous issues (which are discussed it the next section of this wiki). Below is one such ad that began running in October 2008:

C

Despite its slow start, Vista is reportedly deployed on 350 million PCs as of January 2009⁷, and thus has exceeded Microsoft’s two-year projections by 150 million units.⁸