Vista India

Posted on October 5, 2008

Interesting that Microsoft has been bragging about worldwide sales of Vista licenses. They say over 180 million licenses have been sold in all, but seem to be especially pushing the fact that over 2 million licenses have been sold in India.

Why India? Maybe since there are over a billion people there, and with its ever growing technical bent, they feel it’s the place to be touting much more so than the slow-growing over industrialized markets like the US.

Also, the piracy rates in India have been very high traditionally, partially because disposable income has been very low, so the mention of selling a couple million licenses is seen as inroads toward legitimate sales.

True enough, the PC market in India has been growing a lot the last few years, though in reality, only 1.5 percent of the people have a PC.

Microsoft made its first inroads when they started offering their own PC there a while back that ran on a crippled XP designed mostly for students.

The problem here is that when they say they’ve sold 2 million licenses, they make it sound as though people have rushed out to buy shelf copies of Vista to upgrade their PCs when in reality most all of the sales have just been due to new PC purchases.

If we look at the real numbers, India bought over 6.5 million PCs in 2007 and have already bought that many this year. So….that would seem to indicate that Vista was far outstripped by….?? Linux, I suppose…or piracy.