Microsoft ships 60 million Vista units

Total Windows installations expected to pass the one billion mark within the next 12 months

Madeline Bennett, IT Week, 27 Jul 2007

Microsoft has revealed that 60 million units of its Vista operating system have shipped since its release. It expects the total number of Windows installations to pass the one billion mark within the next year.

At a meeting with financial analysts this week, Microsoft announced that 20 million copies of Vista have shipped in the last 75 days, adding to the 40 million previously announced at Microsoft’s Vista sales update in mid-May. The firm also outlined several current or forthcoming large-scale corporate Vista deployments, including 70,000 seats already installed at Banco Bradesco in Brazil, and 10,000 due to be rolled out by the end of 2007 at Continental Airlines.

Microsoft expects to pass the billion mark for total Windows installations within the next 12 months, according to chief executive Steve Ballmer. “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,” he said.

Microsoft also used the meeting to convince skeptics of Vista’s improved security. “Windows Vista is the most secure operating system we've ever released,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer. “In the first 180 days we've had far fewer high-severity vulnerabilities than XP. We've had 12 in Vista. We had 25 in XP.”

Following the financial analyst meeting, Microsoft announced that Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, its unified messaging and presence tools, had been released to manufacturing. Both products are set for an autumn release.

The firm also released the second beta version of Visual Studio 2008, which features a Silverlight Add-in tool to let developers build rich internet applications.

“With Beta 2 we are feature complete, so now is the time to have your first look if you haven’t seen Visual Studio 2008 yet,” wrote S. Somasegar, corporate vice-president of Microsoft’s developer division in a blog post.

Elsewhere, Microsoft made available the second beta release of .NET Framework 3.5, while Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate will be available from Friday.

All three products are scheduled to be released to manufacturing before the end of 2007.