Vista Helps Microsoft Cross $50 Billion Mark

In a presentation on Thursday, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said the company had successfully shipped 60 million copies of Vista, its latest OS offering, since its January 30 release. These numbers showed the OS was well close to beating pre-release expectations.

Turner made this disclosure during the annual meeting of financial analysts at the company’s headquarters in Redmond. He said the company was looking to ship a billion copies to retailers, consumers, and PC manufacturers at the end of the next 12 months.

Vista has created ripples in the market since its entry. Turner said in the first five weeks in the market, it had already surpassed the total number of Apple installations. Earlier information handed out by Microsoft had claimed shipment of 20 million Vista copies in the first month and 40 million in the first 100 days.

The current projections given out by Turner are based on rapidly expanding economic growth in countries like Brazil and Russia. In Brazil, Banco Bradesco has already picked up 70,000 copies of the software. Continental Airlines is expected to pick up around 10,000 copies by year-end.

The numbers speak for themselves. Microsoft officials had said, during a call last week to discuss Q4-07 earnings, the sales of Vista and Office had helped boost revenues to$50 billion. This was a first in the history of the company.

Vista and XP alone contributed about $15 billion in the 2007 fiscal year. This was an increase of $2 billion, making it a 14% jump from the previous year’s numbers.

The obvious popularity of Vista among customers comes from enhanced security features. These make it more reliable than and the preferred choice over XP. Turner said this was substantiated by a 21% drop in calls to customer care centers at the time of Vista’s release, compared to the number of calls at the time XP was released.

While lavishing praise on the new OS and its splendid performance so far, Turner also added a word of caution. He said the company would probably revise Vista’s numbers over the next year. He said the company expected many of the customers to still use XP, and not switch over to Vista anytime soon.

Microsoft is also expecting that after the initial scramble, there would be a decrease in dollar sales of Vista and also XP next year. It expects the decrease to be at a rate of around 9-10 percent.

Analysts add a customary word of caution, though. According to them, it is not necessary that ‘60 million copies shipped’ translates to ‘60 million people using the software’. Balancing this out is the fact that Turner’s magic number does not include PCs under the corporate license agreements that big companies have for using Windows applications.

About 42 million PCs are covered under these agreements. While companies with corporate license agreements have the option of upgrading to Vista, the estimate is a large number of them aren’t going to do this soon.

On another front, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), the company’s collaboration software, raked in $800 million last year. This is again a huge 35% jump from sales figures the prior year. Overall, it seems all is indeed very well at Microsoft.