Vista, the “unqualified success”

Since (we updated it), I’d also refer to Vista as an unqualified success. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t still picking on it, but we’ve sold 180 million copies, something like that, of Vista. The quality, the compatibility (and) particularly from the consumer market, the level of acceptance — I’d call it an unqualified success, over the last six months or so.

Steve Ballmer, in an interview. But what we really want to know — and what Microsoft knows but won’t divulge, thought they know the number — is how many of those Vista copies have been actually activated. I know lots of people who bought laptops with Vista but who paid for the ‘downgrade’ to XP. Each laptop counts as a Vista ‘sale’, but not as a copy in actual use.