Windows NT shipments expected to grow 156% in 1997

I suppose this is a follow-up to yesterday's "Is 1997 the year of NT?"story: According to market researcher Dataquest, unit shipments of WindowsNT will grow 156% this year and sales of Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0will reach 86.5 million for 1997 alone. This represents a 19% increase in32-bit operating system sales for Microsoft over 1996.

"Microsoft has been out there selling the need for a reliable and robust desktop environment, but it takes corporations some time to respond," said Chris Le Tocq, director and of Dataquest's personal computer software program. Almost two years after the release of Windows 95, corporationsare finally moving to the 32-bit operating system en masse and sales ofWindows 95 are up this year over last.

As for Windows NT 4.0, "people started taking a look at it and saying, 'Guess what, this works,' so we expect sales to grow rapidly in the second half of the year," Le Tocq said. "We [also] see a market explosion for [Windows NT-based] Web servers," Le Tocq said. Sales of Windows NT 4.0 will surpass sales of Windows 3.x for this firsttime this year. Dataquest estimates that NT will sell over 40 million unitsof Windows NT by the year 2000