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DSG blames Vista for £20 million in lost profit
UK RETAIL OUTFIT, DSG has issued a profit warning blaming Microsoft's Vista for £20 million in lost profit.
Mark Webb, a spokesman for the group which runs PC World and Currys shops, having largely ditched the Dixons label, said: "Vista just didn't capture the imagination as much as previous versions of Windows." Although sales volumes have been good, he said, "We've not seen the huge rush that we would have hoped for."
Webb said very few people were buying boxed copies of Vista, feeling it was hardly worth upgrading from XP. The weedy OS overhaul also hit sales of new PCs, the company complained.
The company didn't sate how much it now expects to earn in the first half of its fiscal 2007 but says it probably won't be as much as last year.
It hopes to flog lots of big tellies and digital music players to daft, overweight Brits in the run-up to Christmas in order to make up for its over-estimation of the good Vista would do for its bottom line. µ
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Having worked at DSG HQ, I can safely say that the reason for their profit situation, is purely due the ineptitude of those responsible for chosing which products to stock.
For example, the audio-ordering dept (or whatever it is called) is full of people that have no knowledge of forthcoming technology or trends. They chose products to stock based on Google searches and guess-work.

The reason they lose out to online resellers is also largely to do with their ridiculously over-inflated prices.
£15 for a USB cable! £20 for a 20m Cat 5E cable!

Surely this is what happens when you rely on one supplier for a product.
I don't see sainsburys selling one type of butter to go in there vast range of bread!!
fact of the matter is vista appears bad. most people dont realise that it is well worth getting. vista might be expensive but it doesnt affect the sale of pcs if vista is included.

DSG can go sit in the corner but dont blame one of the most secure OS ever
I seem to remember people complaining almost as much about XP, clinging dearly to their Win98 or Win2k boxes (some still do).

XP also had it's share of troubles when it debuted, it happens.

Now, I wish MS had learned from its own past and let Vista mature internally before releasing it to the wild, not to mention really pressuring/helping hardware developers to get drivers working right (from day one). How about giving incentives for creating drivers for older hardware?
If DSG wants to flog more TVs, better hope Russia crash at Israel or something.
Second to a number of comments.

£20 for a Belkin USB cable that costs less than £5 elsewhere.

£300 for a copy of Vista that costs less than £200 elsewhere

Generic or PNY memory that costs more than Crucial, OCZ, Corsair and the like....

Sales are down because people aren't idiots anymore - and then there's the credit crunch, I wonder how many PC's they sell on the 12 month credit deals, people have no money left here, we've been bled dry!
shaun duggan your brain transplant is now available. please phone dr crippen to arrange an appointment.
How despicable!!! Imagine going to such great lengths of actually losing money, just to make Microsoft look bad!! I know these OS religious wars can get pretty heated, but don't you think this is getting a bid ridiculous?!? I mean, as if anyone would be so INSANE as to believe that betting on Microsoft would actually COST you sales!! That's just so excruciatingly funny ... excuse me while I wipe the tears from my eyes ...
Most people (my grandmother included) ARE 'IT Experts' compared to most PC World staff sorry to say.
Most people do not care about buying a OS with some stupid effect called Aero and with compatibility problems

They are sticking to XP SP2 that everything works fine 

When Vista matures enough maybe then people will start going to Vista

Until then XP RULEZ
Sales of Vista in retail are poor but the real shocker is that folks are downgrading to XP to keep some of their equipment working which has no Vista driver. 
Then there are the bugs... Who else but M$ charges a premium for what clearly is a beta test? The business/large volume sector are holding back in droves because they do not need thousands of copies of problems or unnecessary features. 
People, be free of this nonsense! Switch to GNU/Linux, the customizable operating system.
I thought it was nice of DSG to blame Vista for its "lost profits" when the profits in question were speculative in the first place. A company like DSG should not guess how much a product will make them and then moan about it when the forecasts fail to live up to expectation. Maybe if they didn't rip everyone off with over-inflated prices, more people would shop there.
This kind of thing makes me laugh, a lot!

Maybe if they offered XP with new PCs as an option (as even Dell backed down), people would buy a machine from them. Many do not want Vista until it has been proven to work well, which for some it does, for others does not.

They apparently do not even sell XP as an off-the-shelf product! A friend of mine took a PC in for repair, told they needed a re-install of XP, but could only do it if they had the original disk, which they didn't (it was purchased from them...). PCWorld said there was nothing they could do as they didn't have an XP disk themselves.

Needless to say my friend went elsewhere...


So, sell new PCs with XP as an option (for as long as MS will allow) and you might see an increase in sales. Muppets!
It's not surprising given the excessive price. Even more so when you see the Euro price being double what is charged in the US.

If MS want to sell us Vista, they need to fix the driver/software incompatabilities, and drop the price by half.

Another problem with this company is that they only sell Windows PCs (a few Macs, too, I know, but no Linux).

I just bought a laptop from Dell with Ubuntu on it. I tried to get a laptop from PC World, where I had got my earlier one but they don't sell them with Linux or without an operating system so you can put Linux on them. 

That was a lost sale for them as well, but a gain for Dell.
Maybe if they didn't charge AU$750 for a single copy of Vista Ultimate they'd see more retail sales.
.
Surely DSG is wrong?

Only recently, Mr Ballmer enthused at how successful Vista was selling.
I used to work for PC World but have since left (it sucked and there was too much of the hard-sell) and I remember they used to sell the fully boxed retail version with strange looking curvey box. A majority of customers had no idea what Vista actually was so trust me there's no chance in hell their lack of profits were down to the public's intelligence. Those who did know what it was either thought it to be amazing or had jumped on "we hate Vista" bandwaggon.
At over £300 for Vista Ultimate, it's no surprise that nobody bought any though. I only ever saw the odd customer buy Vista Premium Upgrade off the shelf.
It never affected overall PC sales though. Obviously the odd person here and there asked whether XP was an option, but when told no they just bought the PC anyway. The only thing that may have affected it was their Business Centre but to be honest every customer in there claimed to be an "IT Expert" and bought the PC with Vista on it anyway.