Surprising news considering that I have not yet bought Vista.

Windows Vista is basically useless, I don't think many users will buy a new PC in order to have it. But Office is a revolution, not Word or Excel but Access and Groove, this one offered in Enterprise editions.

And MS margins are so high as they sell at 10 what it cost them... 0. Apart from the R&D costs, of course.

Indeed, Vista has been selling very well. It's gratifying to, once again, see the negative, FUD-generating sites the Internet is infested with be proven flatly wrong...;) Ah, joy. Makes my day.

When people wake up one day and realize that 99.9% of the half-baked and self-appointed web-site pundits and critics, who accomplish nothing and contribute nothing to anybody's computing environment, are in reality seeking only to glorify and glamorize themselves by pretending to be knowledgeable instead of ignorant as they truly are--well, when that day comes, the Internet will have made great strides in maturity....;)

Frankly, I'm sick of hearing cheapskate software pirates trying to justify not paying for their software by knocking it and talking about how bad it is. What an illogical conundrum they present. I mean, the only possible justification for pirating software is how *good* you think it is, right? Who but a dumbbell would bother to pirate rotten software?....;) Amazing how many freely admit they spend their hours pirating software they think is too rotten to pay for...;) Heh, that's really funny when you think about it.

I paid about the same thing for WinXP Pro in '01 as I paid for Vista Ultimate retail in '07, and I have to say that for my one-time investment in XP in '01 I received years and years of updates and feature enhancements absolutely free of charge. I expect the same will be true of Vista. That makes Microsoft's XP OS the best-supported software I have ever owned, bar none. It's so tiring to listen to people rant about how clever they are by not paying for the OS they choose to use, while completely forgetting to inform their readers about all of the inconvenient hoops they have to constantly jump through in order just to keep on using it without paying for it--while in the very next breath they'll talk about the 3d games they *bought* which offer just a fraction of the longevity and usefulness of the OS they keep trying to convince themselves wasn't worth paying for. It seems like such an awful lot of work and effort for such a small, miserly return.

#3, Yes, monopoly usually means you rake in the dough. Big surprise there.

Which monopoly is that? Apple's vertical monopoly or M$'s horizontal monopoly? Six in one, half a dozen in the other. Did no one see Apple's numbers for last quarter? Or their profit margins?

Also, lets not be gullible and expect something other than positive rhetoric in a financial report, that's the whole point, whatever can be put in a positive light will get the fluffing

Where exactly is the negative, then, in a 65% rise in income? How do you spin that?

Hmm, lose $3 and be saddled with vista or get free ubuntu and be free of the crap..

Not to mention being free from viable commercial hardware and software choices. But you go ahead and be a rebel in your basement; I'm sure mom will be along shortly to do your laundry.

I used WinME for 5years as a primary OS (That's what got me hooked on Slackware/VectorLinux lol).

Edit: Meant as a reply to elsewhere...

When will you guys realize that whether you like it or not you will eventually buy vista. This is M$ world and there is nothing anyone can do about it. And... it's not about to change any time soon.

Now lower the price to North americans to 3 dollars....so they don't switch to Ubuntu...
fp

My guess is - it's tighter activation scheme and integration with windows update converts lots pirated installs into legal one.

Wow ramming Vista down major OEMs and consumers throats worked. Big surprise, ship a broken product and the sheep buy it because there only other option is paying an extra 300 dollars for the same or inferior hardware and OSX. Maybe they should consider making a new version that works out of the box and looks like windows instead of a crappy OSX look alike.

Looking at the IT community in my area, I can say that I have never seen so many licensing audits from M$ in my career.
In the past, there was one audit every other year, maybe two. I have seen three in the last few months!

Perhaps there may be other reasons for M$'s up tick in revenues?

: doing my best Ellen Feiss impression :

But, but, but no one likes Vista! And, and, and Apple is taking over! And everyone is buying Macs! And BillGateszebub is still t3h d3phi1!!!!11!eleventyhundredandone!!!11!

This can't be true! OMFGBBQXXXWTF!!

That's a neti income of almost five billion dollars. It's still a money machine.

I don't think anything can or ever will be as terrible as windows millenium. I actually like vista i think its a nice new look over the gui of xp. Plus i have yet to see any performance disadvantages with vista over my original xp 64 bit build. If anything vista seems to run much better then xp ever did on my machine.