Sales of the Vista operating system have hit the 100 million-mark, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Sunday night at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in what is expected to be his last keynote address.
Microsoft has not broken down what percentage of those sales were from enterprise customers but the company said that 96 percent of all Windows PCs sold through retail are now based on Vista, up from 77 percent last February, shortly after the official launch of Microsoft's latest client operating system.
Overall, enterprises have been slow to upgrade their Windows XP-based systems to Vista, according to industry analysts. Nonetheless, Gates crowed at last night's CES about hitting the 100 million-mark, up from 88 million licenses in late October.
"That's a very significant milestone for the kind of applications development, and special hardware work that we think is very important," Gates said.
Analysts expect enterprises to remain cautious with regard to Vista in 2008. The good news for Microsoft is that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is plugging holes in the Vista OS right now. Microsoft dropped the SP1 release candidate on Dec. 5 and expects to ship the final SP1 bits in the first quarter. By all accounts, the service pack has significantly improved matters.
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