Formatting

Surely, this 100 million figure doesn't take into account the number of people who, like me, received a new PC with Vista in it, tried it a few days to see if they liked it or not, and then formatted the PC to install XP on it.

I'm pretty sure that there's a good percentage of people who did that.

"Sold"?

Can you actually claim you "sold" more than 100 million copies, when they were forced down the throat of the public? Thats like going to buy a new car, and EVERY dealer having only one option:

The newest car on the market. It runs slow, isnt what it is supposed to be, its overpriced, and youll probably have to upgrade a lot of its components. You wont be able to turn the radio on and plug your flash drive into it w/out it telling you thats an illegal operation. Every time you put your turn signal on, hit the horn button, turn the wipers on, turn the car off, pop the trunk.... a message will appear on the dash asking "are you sure"? It will only operate on certain roads.

OR...

The public SCREAMS until you bring back a discontinued model thats been around a few years, still has a few bugs, but is the best car put out to date.

Can you REALLY say you sold 100 million of car #1 if you did it was the publics only mainstream option? You FORCED it on them to try to strong arm everyone into buying your product. And as another reader already pointed out, did the SUBTRACT from that total of 100 million, all the people that left that "new car" parked in the driveway unused, and went back to their older, more reliable car? Vizta caused me to switch to Ubuntu, Im not following the MS barinwashing/strongarming tactics. I am capable of thinking for myself. So far half my machines are dual boot, and hopefully by mid-year, all of them will be. MS is a joke. Vizta is a joke. Nuff said.

Its like my dad always said... "You can polish a dog turd all you want. When its said and done, it's still a piece of shit. It might be a shiny piece of shit, but its STILL just a piece of shit.

boxed copies and corporate copies

The other thing you didn't include in your calculation is the copies that were purchased, but were not on a new computer. That would include two categories:

Retail boxed copies of Vista.

Corporate volume licenses. And as we all know, the vast majority of those are going to be used for licensing XP installs.

So the actual number of new PCs that shipped with vista is even lower. Who knows? Maybe it's as low as 30 or even 25 percent.