If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view. The $5.3 billion figure from a year ago included $1.2 billion of presales prior to Vista’s release, which actually took place in the previous quarter. So it is more accurate to view it as a revenue decline from $4.1 billion to $4 billion (2.4%) in a market that’s growing at around 12%.
Clearly Vista has not been a success (see 10 Reasons Why Vista Is A Disaster). It never provoked much immediate growth in PC sales when it was released, as previous releases of Windows did, and it isn’t particularly appealing to customers now that a year has passed. Aside from this, the decline is Windows revenues is caused by a combination of 4 factors:
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