Microsoft News Tracker

Not only is NPD out with estimates of holiday Xbox sales in North America at retail stores, they also have the same skinny on PC sales. Joe Wilcox has the story at Microsoft Watch:

NPD’s holiday retail sales data–for the five weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas–show sustained holiday PC sales, even without Windows Vista. PCs sales continued the trend foreshadowed by fairly strong Black Friday sales results.
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In terms of notebook units sold through retail stores, there was a 58 percent increase year over year, according to NPD. Revenue rose 26 percent, with ASP (average selling price) of $777, down $202 from the same period last year.

By contrast, desktop retail sales declined a modest 1.2 percent in units and 8.5 percent in revenue. Falling ASPs–down 10 percent year over year–contributed to the revenue declines. However, ASPs fell a half percent less than holiday 2005 compared to 2004.

“There’s not much lower ASPs can go,” said Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis. Holiday 2006 ASP for desktops was $537, compared to $587 in 2005.

More by following the link, but NPD’s Chris Swenson observes that there has been little historical correlation between PC sales and a new operating system (or lack thereof) and these numbers bear that out. I would also suggest that it will be interesting to see how many purchasers will cash in their Vista upgrade coupons if in fact they received them, although it’s not clear we will ever get firm data.

NPD also released some preliminary numbers for software sales which showed a big increase for security software but Microsoft’s OneCare had only 2-3% of the market, down from its early sales surge.

Update: While we’re on the subject of retail software sales, also check out Joe Wilcox’s explanation of the odd situation with Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 which makes up 80% of productivity suite retail sales according to NPD.

There are only partial reports yet, but the market analysts at NPD are teasing on North American retail store sales:

According to the firm’s preliminary estimates, as reported by CNBC, around 2 million Xbox 360 units were sold in North America from November up until December 25.

The figure for Nintendo Wii stood at 1.8 million units - despite the fact the console only launched in North America on November 19, and the first batch of stock sold out within hours.

Sony’s PS3 shortage left them with only 750,000 sales, but I’ll also be interested to see how the PS2 does.

Meanwhile, Nintendo Wii sales surge in Japan according to Media Create Co. Ltd.:

With the latest figures, Nintendo sits on the cusp of selling its millionth Wii console in Japan. To Dec. 24, a total of 824,311 units have been sold, putting the million mark well within reach during the last week of the year as long as the company can keep supplies flowing into shops. In contrast, total sales of the PlayStation 3, which has been on sale for 3 weeks longer than Wii, totaled 385,791 units due to lower supply.

The figures also delivered some good news for Microsoft Corp. Sales of the Xbox 360 were 17,213 units, which is almost unchanged from the week earlier and still well above their level in November.

The good news is clearly relative of course.