The Register reports today that Microsoft’s quarter 1 profits were down by 10.9% to just $4.3bn.

So, M$ is still feeling the after effects of yet another crappy OS in Vista and the only thing that’s really saving it is sales of the Xbox.

M$ has claimed that it has sold 140 million licences for Vista. Even taking into account world-wide sales, that sounds like a hell of a high number to me. If I had been asked I would have said it was closer to 10 million, taking into consideration all the other operating systems available, and that no corporate customer I know of has upgraded to Vista yet. Certainly my lot have stayed with XP and that’s no bad thing. Hell, much of the MoD is still running NT!

So, what’s next for M$? I know that Server 2008 is on its way, and there was a rumour floating round the ‘nets that M$ might break its desktop delivery schedule and replace Vista in 2009, a year early.

In the meantime I also heard that SP3 for XP will be available Monday. Wonder what’s going t break this time when we install it…