wow

This should be more along the lines of "Consumers had no choice when buying a new PC at a retail store." If you still want XP you have to buy online now and specify that you still want XP. Pretty soon that'll probably go away as well.

Fantastic news  

Too bad 19,990,000 PC's are still on the shelves.   

The alternative to that would be low PC, and thus, low Vista sales, with Apple and homebuilt and/or Linux computers becoming more prominent. This data shows at least that Vista hasn't stopped people from buying Windows-based PCs. Besides, for the vast majority of people, it doesn't make much sense to buy a boxed copy of Vista, since they probably couldn't run it on their older machines. I'd say this is the best and most realistic news Microsoft could have gotten.

And yet there are 200 Million PCs trying to activate. 

I didn't get what you meant.   

was trying to make a pirate reference . . .

Failed.    

ha ha ha,
now its not a complete loss.   

I use Windows XP Home and other Microsoft products, but I got to tell you, numbers are just what they are, numbers. Unless a relationship between current numbers of Vista for a like period of XP is established they are just numbers. There are a whole lot of variables to consider. Marketing allows you to not use or throw out those that don't enable you to sell your product.

Since it's 5 pluse years since XP it's correct to assume there are more computers out there. That being said, I kind of feel the ratio of people not upgrading to XP when it came out is lower than the current ratio of people not upgrading to Vista. In other words people have decided to wait and upgrade in a year or two. My own opinion.

Whether to upgrade should be decided by the strengths of Vista vs XP.

I do get carried away at times, sorry.   

I bet they counted all the free licenses they gave away as "Sold"

well, technically, they were sold, if you mean the Free Upgrades for XP buyers. You had to pay for XP to get the Vista, and whoop-de-doo. 20 Million copies in a month. I work at a PC store, and we custom-build PCs for customers. We've had about 20 or 25 customers come in specifically for Vista, and we sell Home Basic for about 5 bucks more than XP Home. what made them mad is that they had to come back in to upgrade their machines just to run it. I still recommend XP home for the average user, and Vista seems like a bigger hassle than it's worth for that demographic. My Gaming PC rated a 4.8 for Vista and it's running fine. But it's a high end PC, so that makes sense to me. but we've had some of the funniest people asking for upgrades. the worst- a 533 MHz PIII(SLOT 1!) 128MB PC133 RAM, and a 10 gig drive. Ati Rage Graphics! and we ended up selling him a whole new system with XP Home.

and the great debate continues...

and 19.99 Million people that cant get ALL of their software to run!