Microsoft and some of its partners are hoping that Vista will be the gift that fills their holiday stocking this year. This is the first year that notebooks and desktop computers loaded with Vista software were available for the recent lucrative back-to-school season, as well as for the upcoming holiday season.
As Windows Vista was only widely released at the end of January 2007, Microsoft and its partners essentially missed both of these peak retail periods in 2006, although retailers did offer customers who bought machines upgrade coupons to Vista once it was available. "I expect sales of notebooks and desktops loaded with Windows Vista to eclipse the sales we did last holiday season of machines with Windows XP," Wendy Fritz, a vice president at Best Buy, in Richfield, Minn., told eWEEK at a Microsoft-sponsored dinner Oct. 23 to discuss the first holiday season with Windows Vista broadly available.