Following recent claims of Acer's CEO Gianfranco Lanci that "the whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is dismissing concerns about a slow adoption rate of the new OS.
According to Ballmer, Vista has shipped 60 million copies in its first six months, eclipsing Apple's entire installed base in only 5 weeks of shipments. The software giant also said it is well on the way to reaching 1 billion Windows users by the end of the fiscal year:
"The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion," Ballmer told the group. "If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept."
Microsoft's Windows XP continues to dominate the PC market though, controlling 81.94% of all desktops connected to the Internet. Meanwhile, Vista is seeing slow but steady growth going from 0.93% market share in February, to 3.02% in April, to the current 4.52%, according to market watcher Net Applications.