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Microsoft internal metrics show Vista piracy rate about half that of XP

Windows with all its faults and problems is still the most popular computer operating system around. That also means it is one of the most pirated operating systems around.

Piracy of the Windows operating system is so rampant that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced in February of this year that piracy was to blame for slow Vista sales. Ironically, a month after the piracy is to blame for slow sales announcement; Microsoft came back touting its brisk sales figures for Windows Vista.

By July of 2007, Microsoft had sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista and proudly proclaimed it intended to ship 1 billion copies by 2008. In an effort to stop pirates from selling illegal copies of Vista, Microsoft introduced a reduced functionality mode in September of 2007. The same month Microsoft announced it would downgrade Vista haters to Windows XP.

This week Microsoft announced that its Vista SP1 would directly target users running illegal copies of Vista. Microsoft Corporate vice president of Windows product marketing Michael Sievert said in an interview this week, “While piracy rates are hard to measure precisely, we’re seeing indications from internal metrics, like WGA validation failures, that the Windows Vista piracy rate is less than half that of Windows XP today.”

Armchair analysts claim the reason the Vista piracy rate is half that of XP is that even pirates expect a stable operating system. Microsoft however attributes this reduction in piracy to the increased security measures in Windows Vista.

The company claims to date it has pursued legal action against more than 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products. Microsoft also says that Vista SP1 will directly address hacks enabling counterfeiters to activate illegal copies of Vista.

Sievert, a realist, has an easy explanation for the lack of piracy on Windows Vista. "We know that Windows Vista is a lot harder to counterfeit than Windows XP, but we also know that pirates will keep trying," he closes.


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Typical Naysayers
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 12/5/2007 6:25:18 PM , Rating: 3
Same bashing Vista is taking, is the same bashing I saw Win98 get subjected to when Win95 was dominant. It's the same bashing that WinXP took when Win2000 was dominant.... "Requires more resources, its just eye candy, it has driver problems, it has this bug, it has that bug, etc... etc...."

Give it a rest guys. Overall, the majority of Vista users (Who actually use it, not those that touched it for 15-20 minutes and then got rid of it) are pleased with the product, myself included. XP was not the end all be all when it launched, and it took 3 years for most people to migrate to it from 98SE and 2000.

Vista is just fine. If you want to whine about hardware requirements, look at the difference between 2000 and XP, XP is exactly double what 2000 was. Vista is exactly double what XP was, notice a pattern?




RE: Typical Naysayers
By Xonoahbin on 12/5/07, Rating: 0
RE: Typical Naysayers
By Nekrik on 12/5/2007 7:50:39 PM , Rating: 5
it'so strange, a lot of other costs have increased too :), it's a bad software industry. Minimum wage, the cost of milk, houses, movie tickets, beer, air travel, etc... have all gone up. I think one reason software gets percieved as a rip-off is because the once astronomical cost of hardware seems to have dropped, 650MB drives no longer cost in the thousands. Then again, you can easily drop $600 bucks on a soon to be outdated video card and no one bitches the way they do about software that they'll run for the next 4-5 years. Way back when the entry cost of any machine was ~$3500 and there was no $300 machines available. Now days you can get Dell dirt cheap but you can also still drop $4000 - $6000 on one as well.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By 306maxi on 12/6/2007 4:09:26 AM , Rating: 2
I'm sorry but compare prices of OEM XP products and their Vista equivalents and there is very little difference. It's another one of those myths. People go on about how Ultimate costs about 3 billion dollars in retail form but fail to realise that you can have the OEM version for much less and all you need to do is call Microsoft if you want to move it to a new PC.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By therealnickdanger on 12/6/2007 7:33:58 AM , Rating: 3
Again, with the exception of Ultimate, OEM and retail prices of Vista are completely in line with XP and 2000 before it. If my memory serves me properly, I would even wager that Vista Basic launched $20-30 cheaper than XP Home did when it launched, but I may be confusing XPH retail to VB OEM.

The Vista-hate is reminiscent of XP-hate. During the beta, I had my doubts as well, but even then I knew that I liked it more than XP. After tweaking it the same way I tweaked XP, Vista impressed me more. I may or may not have lost some performance in my games (115fps instead of 120fps? OMG call the National Guard!), but for all the in-between times and general use, Vista is quicker and more stable than XP was. I'll likely never go back. Good job, Microsoft.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By Drexial on 12/6/2007 10:23:17 AM , Rating: 5
the difference between vista and XP, is with XP it was rushed to market to replace ME, one year after ME hit the market to be precise. With vista, they took 5 years to make it suck. I don't hate vista as much as i'm disappointed with it. If it was everything they promised in longhorn, then i would have been very pleased with it, even if it was a little buggy at first. But at least it would have been a new better idea. Instead they repackage XP and rearrange everything thats been there since 95 to make things easier for the end user to break and harder for the experienced used to fix.

And its not really right to compare 2000 to XP because no one really used 2000 for home use in the general market.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By kalak on 12/6/2007 11:52:30 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
Vista is quicker and more stable than XP was. I'll likely never go back. Good job, Microsoft.


Oh, my, OH MY !Really.... TODAY, Vista is NOT quicker and NOWAY much stable than XP. I have Vista installed on my two computers. It's very buggy indeed, but, of course, Microsoft will launch SP1, SP2, etc. And I believe that Vista will become stable , but actually, it's not.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By 306maxi on 12/6/07, Rating: 0
RE: Typical Naysayers
By 306maxi on 12/6/2007 11:54:56 AM , Rating: 1
Agreed.

I like the other "OMFG it's using all my ram!!!1111 when XP only uses half or a quarter" Vista myth.

If these people knew anything they'd realise that Vista is making use of that RAM that's just sitting there rather than let it sit and do nothing until you fire up a game. Perfect way to illustrate it is with a G15 showing the performance monitor on the LCD. Sometimes my PC will sit at idle using 60% of the RAM (1.2gb of 2gb) and when I start Team Fortress 2 the ram usage suddenly drops to about 30% and then as TF2 loads it goes up again. Basically Vista uses your RAM to speed up everyday programs rather than just using it on demand as XP would have done. Much more intelligent use of RAM and it does speed things up.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By amanojaku on 12/5/2007 6:35:36 PM , Rating: 4
That's true enough. It's just fun to see some of the more creative bashings. Hell, if you ask me none of the operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS, UNIX) are really all they're cracked up to be. But then again, I'm the same guy who didn't like "The Matrix." *ducks the slings and arrows*


RE: Typical Naysayers
By MatthewAC on 12/5/2007 6:36:43 PM , Rating: 1
The Matrix sucked, and I agree, with Kenobi, been running Vista since early june, no problems since then.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By murphyslabrat on 12/5/2007 9:12:08 PM , Rating: 2
I've been running Vista since I got several copies for free through the MSDN Academic Alliance. I have had only one problem: driver incompatibility. This gets to be a real pain when most people that use it (my family) have virtually no computer-foo, no matter how hard I try to teach them.

Like has been said, just wait.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By xsilver on 12/6/2007 7:33:19 AM , Rating: 4
While there is nothing really "wrong" with vista
Maybe it has to do with how much of an improvement there has been over xp?
eg. win98/me to winxp = huge jump
win 3.11 to win 95 = huge jump
win 95 to win 98 = moderate jump?
win xp to vista = small jump??????

and not to forget win 98 to win me = new sticker - SOS...
All its going to take is for that one great app that doesnt work in xp and only works in vista and a lot of people migrate. DX10 games is a start, not sure if it could be the finish though.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By TomZ on 12/6/2007 9:48:26 AM , Rating: 1
All the operating system releases have been evolutionary upgrades - relatively small jumps. But also remember that a lot of the evolution of the OS happens after its release. For example, XP has changed a lot since it was released - a lot of security enhancements were made and a lot of other features added that Microsoft gave away for free (in a sense). I expect that Vista will be no different.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By noirsoft on 12/6/2007 6:15:33 PM , Rating: 1
You forgot Windows 2000, which was the real predecessor to XP, not 98. It's really more like

3.1 to 95 -> big jump
95 to 98 -> small to moderate jump
98 to 2000 -> big jump
2000 to XP -> moderate jump
XP to Vista -> moderate to big jump

Just because you skipped a step doesn't make your comparisons right. I could just as easily say that going from Windows 3.1 to XP was a huge gap, and that there's something wrong with Vista because it wasn't as big a jump...


RE: Typical Naysayers
By SmokeRngs on 12/7/2007 4:18:41 PM , Rating: 2
Windows 2000 was the predecessor to XP, but it was not the follow up to Windows 98.

Win2k was the follow up to WinNT4. It was made as a business oriented OS as NT4 was before it.

However, 2k had the side effect of being a hell of a lot more stable with better memory management than 98 as well as the removal of 16 bit code from the OS. This spurred consumer sales of the operating system which was meant for businesses.

WinXP isn't much more than 2k with a facelift and some added features for the home user as well as higher system requirements.

For myself, the advantages for going to 2k over 98 were enormous. The better memory management, NTFS and other things for the most part negated any slowdowns associated with a newer operating system running the same hardware with both. XP did not offer those same advantages over 2k while increasing the need for faster hardware. While I eventually ended up going with XP, it wasn't much of an advantage over 2k when it was first released.

I find the same thing with Vista now. There are few things which I find to be advantages over Vista and a lot of negatives. I hate the way many of the things have been shuffled around yet again. Don't even get me started on the pain in the ass Vista's network management is.

Before you accuse me of being an uneducated Vista basher, I have it installed as part of a triple boot setup along with XP and openSUSE 10.3. I use openSUSE as my daily OS and rarely do anything outside of it. For games I want to play which don't have native Linux ports or I can't get to run properly under Wine, I boot into XP. I keep Vista around as I need to learn it to fix problems with computers brought to me with that OS installed. I boot into it every few weeks to mess around with it just to try and learn a bit more about it but that's all. I have also been using it off and on since the RC1 days so I have a decent amount of experience with it.

Vista is not a huge change in usability compared to XP for most people. The shuffling around of many options yet again is a pain for most people who are accustomed to MS's previous OSes. The additional hardware requirements for just the basic OS are not acceptable to me at this time compared to any advancements over XP. As I said, this was the same situation with 2k and XP.

My personal thought is that Vista is not a very good product considering the amount of time and resources put into it over the years. For my uses it has not increased my production at all. Considering the Vista performance metric has my 7600GT as the lowest factor at a 5.0, I would say my hardware is more than sufficient to run it optimally.


RE: Typical Naysayers
By EntreHoras on 12/6/2007 11:12:01 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
The Matrix sucked, and I agree

Aghhh... ahhhg... air, I need air...

The Matrix doesn't suck; you suck!!!! </babycrying>


RE: Typical Naysayers
By PandaBear on 12/5/07, Rating: 0
RE: Typical Naysayers
By bangmal on 12/5/2007 7:04:57 PM , Rating: 1
Vista improved a lot too, much more than aero, much more improvement than 95 to 98.
You use whatever you like, but just dont make things up to prove your point.

If why MS was was allowed to intergrate IE is still beyond your understanding, then you have some serious brain problems. It was not clear 10 years ago, it should be perfectly clear now: Internet Browser is an essential part of any Operating System.