Charles - there are actually about 8M new PCs shipped per month - but 1Q is seasonally the slowest. About 20% of those are consumer machines which run Win98 - so the commercial segment accounts for the rest, a bit over 6M a month. The mix in commercial PC OS shipments is about 60% Win98 - so the balance would be NT and Win2K... for these discussions we can ignore the small fraction of "other" desktop OS shipments. Apple is not in the PC numbers.
So there are maybe 2.5M PCs shipped OEM per month which would be candidates for Win2K. One assumes that the large commercial accounts who have standard NT4 deployments will keep doing that. Most of the projections I saw indicated perhaps 500,000 OEM units in the first month, eventually ramping to 1.5M by the end of 2000, and maybe half that at reatil. If they sold 500,000 through OEMs, then they are about on track on OEM shipments, but about double on retail sales versus expectations.
re: One million copies could be almost all manufacturer installs on new PC's, which I hope would work straight out of the box without the need for a support call.
Well, the OEMs take the support calls for their products, not MS - so the calls MS is talking about have to be either sales of units via "Select" (which is how large commercial accounts buy much of their software, including OS upgrades) and sales at retail.
There is certainly lots of room for spin in that statement (lower support calls) but I would hope that they are talking about weighted numbers - calls per 100,000 sales or something.
My own experience would indicate that if the hardware is W2K compatible, then an upgrade installation is pretty simple. If the HW is not Win2K compatible, a support call won't help - the HW vendor has to come up with a driver... and in the meantime the user gets either a "default" driver, or does without. |
