January 7, 2008
Microsoft by the numbers
The consumer electronics industry’s big annual bash in Las Vegas got off to its usual start on Sunday evening - a speech from Bill Gates, boss of a company that still often seems to be struggling to locate its own consumer gene.
Gates’ CES speeches (this will be his last) are a useful reminder of just how many eggs Microsoft has in the consumer basket. No matter if HD-DVD has all but lost the next-gen DVD format war, Microsoft is also pushing ahead fast with Xbox Live Marketplace, a venue for selling downloadable video (some cynics, in fact, claim that this is where its real long-term interest lies and it only ever saw HD-DVD as a diversionary tactic to try to stall Sony’s Blu-ray.)
To coincide with CES, Microsoft issued a deluge of fresh data about its consumer businesses. But what do all the numbers really add up to?
Windows Vista. 100m licences in the first year. This compares with 67m licences in the first year of XP - but then, there are many more PCs around now. Consumers certainly didn’t take quickly to Vista. The new Aero interface was meant to produce a "wow" effect but that was quickly drowned out by problems with incompatible device drivers, insufficient machine memory, and other glitches. With a de-bugged service pack release due soon, though, Vista’s early bad press should eventually fade.
Xbox 360. 17.7m sold to date. A good headstart in the next-gen console race. But the Wii shows no signs of slowing down, and the apparent defeat of HD-DVD gives the (Blu-ray enabled) PS3 a much-needed boost.
Xbox games. 1.6m copies of Mass Effect sold in the first six weeks, and plenty of buzz among Xbox’s core users. Finally, a game to stand alongside Halo?
Zune Social. More than 1.5m registered users. That’s not a bad start for the social networking play that is meant to do for the Zune player what Xbox Live is starting to do for the console. That’s no replacement, though, for actually selling the hardware. Tellingly, there were no numbers on how many Zunes were sold over the holidays.
Beijing Olympics. 3,000 hours of exclusive online video from NBC will be powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight. That will be a great showcase for a technology that is fighting it out with Adobe’s Flash player. However, the joint NBC/ MSN site for the Olympics will carry adverts that are sold and served up by NBC, so no success here in extending Microsoft’s online advertising reach.
