Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

As predicted, Halo 3 sold like hotcakes when it debuted last week.

Microsoft’s Halo 3 release sets sales record

The marketing blitz paid off, as Microsoft reported $170 million in U.S. sales in the first 24 hours after Monday’s midnight release, breaking the U.S. first-day sales record set by predecessor Halo 2.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t won big with Vista, the newest version of the Windows operating system, which was released in January of this year:

Act Now and Get a Downgrade to the OS You Really Want, ABSOLUTELY FREE!

With Vista failing to win over the consumer and enterprise markets in the way it had imagined, Microsoft over the summer quietly began allowing PC makers to offer a “downgrade” option to customers who prefer XP to the pre-installed Vista software. Now the company has gone a step further and extended by five months the deadline to buy Windows XP at retail or with a new PC. Microsoft had planned to cut off XP sales on Jan. 30, 2008, one year after the launch of Vista. Now, it will cut them off on June 30, 2008.

Maybe if they had replaced the old, much-despised “Clippy” with the icon of a helpful Master Chief . . .