Speaking at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., said Sunday that his company sold more than 100 million licenses of Windows Vista since the operating system was launched more than a year ago.

However, it's still clear that the new Windows Vista operating system is proving far less popular with new PC buyers than Windows XP did during XP's first year on the market. For example, Vista captured just 39 percent of the new PC market, while Windows XP retained a strong 67 percent. Windows XP in its first full year on the market sold more than 89 million copies, but the new PC market back then, in 2001-2002, was far smaller, partially due to the post 9-11 gloom.

Net Applications Inc., a company which monitors traffic at approximately 40,000 Web sites, reports that Vista's share broke the 10 percent mark for the first time, to end the year at around 10.5 percent. In comparison, Microsoft's Windows XP accounted for 76.9 percent and Apple's Mac OS X around 7.3 percent during December. The data can easily be gathered because browsers report to sites the operating system they run on.

PC World, the guys behind the "top 100 high-tech products of the year", have in December confirmed what everybody already knew: that Vista is a more or less a flop. In a top that contains other big flops (like Zune, Amazon Unbox, Office 2007, Yahoo and even the iPhone), Windows Vista came first, surpassing its "contenders" by far.

Among the reasons cited by PC World for blasting Microsoft's OS is the "user account control" (UAC) -- allegedly one of the security features in Vista aimed at giving users more control over their machine, but which ended up annoying them. Windows Vista might not be that bad, but when you think that XP is faster, has no compatibility issues, works fine on weaker hardware and does not cost $399, you have to agree with PC World. According to them, the best system to run Vista is... an Apple MacBook Pro.