I must apologize... 10085

snips

If they wanted "Windows" - and buttuming that most folks like to keep reasonably current - why were XP boxed set sales so miserably bad?

Now, sales of XP shipped with systems, those were brisk enough... but XP boxed version, sitting on the shelf, waiting to be purchased directly, could pretty much expect to sit there and gather dust.

Most users do not want Windows... most users, in my experience, have no clue what Windows is. They know the name, sure, but that's about it; they don't have any real conception of what it is or what it does. For most, the actual knowledge level involved is pretty minimal: "I click on the document, it opens in my word processor. I click on the link, it opens in my web browser. I click the little blue envelope icon, I can read my email."

About the only reason most of them are even aware of Windows is simply marketing. Even there, often as not, it's not Windows they're interested in at all. It's more like "I need to run MS Office Doom 3 Simply Accounting whatever; will this new computer do that?" If they know the name "Windows" at all, it's more from the requirements of the programs they use: "Requires Windows 2000 or better" prompts the inevitable "My program requires Windows 2000 or better... will this machine run my program?"

This sort of thing is fairly easily demonstrated; simply look around you and see the number of people you know who use computers. Discount the ones who are technical users - programmers, sysadmins, etc - and focus on the actual "user" types. Pick half a dozen at random and ask them what Windows actually is, and what it actually does. A lot of them won't be able to even distinguish between "Windows" and "Office", never mind figuring out what, if anything, Windows actually does for them.

When you ask "What proof do you have that they do *not* want Windows?", the issue isn't really that they want something other than Windows, or that they dislike Windows, but, rather, that they don't actually want Windows; they don't even know what it is. What they really want is the ability to do X - play a game, run a program, read a document, whatever - and largely thanks to marketing (and helped along a fair bit by closed source and closed formats), their solution to meet this need is to simply spew forth a canned response, to wit, "Windows", without any actual conception of what that even means.