Microsoft: Vista Eclipsed Apple's Installed Base in 5 Weeks


A triumphant Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner trumpeted Windows Vista's sales success during a conference call with analysts, Salon reports.

Turner took aim at Apple and its recent PC market share: "By our math, we eclipsed the entire installed base of Apple in the first five weeks that this product shipped," Turner said.

Ballmer, in turn, reiterated Windows' dominance: "If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept."

Turner also claimed that Vista's level of vulnerability had proven lower than either XP's or Apple's, citing 21% fewer support calls for Vista than XP, and 12 vulnerabilities reported in the first 180 days.

Vista has been regarded by many analysts as a relative failure, compared to previous Microsoft operating system releases, as a critical mass of consumers and businesses have not purchased retail copies of the OS. Most of Vista's sales have been OEM'd with PCs, which have seen buoyant sales recently.