The more than 20 million copies shipped represent Windows Vista licenses sold to PC manufacturers, copies of upgrades and the full packaged product sold to retailers and upgrades ordered through the Windows Vista Express Upgrade program from January 30 to February 28.

Let’s break this down a bit.

Windows Vista licenses sold to PC manufacturers (is this for computers that have shipped or are waiting to be built for customer demand? It’s not really clear?)

Full packaged product sold to retailers (I would imagine the boxed retail channel will be the smallest of the number).

Upgrades ordered through the Windows Vista Express Upgrade (Well I have ordered 4 of these from Dell, and none have shipped yet)

Tellingly The Windows XP numbers for the same period are not mentioned but any Windows Vista Express Upgrade is basically an XP Sale with a low cost upgrade to Vista.

I would love to see the real numbers.

On a related topic I think a better metric is looking at your web site stats to see the Percentage of operating systems for your visitors. My content is all technology related (and I talk a lot about Windows Vista) I am currently running at about 30% of visitors running Windows Vista.

That sounds good but I just checked some of the other web sites I manage (non tech) for clients and the percentage of Windows Vista Users is 1% (and I am pretty sure my own vista usage is a decent percentage of that 1%).

What does this all mean?

Well Vista is shipping in millions, but it’s still early days.

If you are having difficulty in deciding if you want Windows Vista drop me a comment or e-mail, let’s see if I can help you.

A good place to start is checking out my Windows Vista Screencasts

If you are a Business considering the move to Windows Vista / Office 2007 you really need some advice prior to any deployment (01606-841587 ask for Colin).

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/