Aug 1, 2011 14:21 GMT  ·  By

Windows 7 continues to eat away at Windows XP, and it might still prove the right platform to take down the current king of the operating system market ahead of Windows 8’s launch. The development process of Windows 8 is approaching the Beta phase, although Microsoft has yet to offer any details related to the progress it made with the next major iteration of Windows.

Windows 8 Beta is in fact expected sometime around the BUILD conference in mid-September 2011, if not at the event itself, another piece of information that the software giant has to confirm or deny.

Customers around the world have yet to shift their focus onto the next major version of Windows, and are embracing Windows 7 en masse.

Just last month, Microsoft revealed that Windows 7 was outselling Windows XP by three to one, and that in excess of 400 million licenses of the operating system have already been sold.

I asked a Microsoft contact whether the 400 million copies of Windows 7 have been shipped into the channel or actually sold to customers, and he stressed that they actually made their way to users worldwide.

According to statistics from Net Applications, Windows 7’s usage share continues to increase in the past couple of months, jumping to 27.87% at the end of July 2011 from 27.13% the previous month.

In the same period of time, Windows XP’s usage share dipped from 51.13% to as low as 49.84%. Similarly, Windows Vista dropped even further, from 9.52% to 9.24%.

Apple’s mobile platform showed a small increase in usage share, with iOS iPhone now at 1.56% from 1.41%, the previous month, and iPad up to 1.23% from 1.03%. Mac OS X’s usage share stagnated at 3.7% for the past two months. Net Applications continue to indicate that Linux is being used by less than 1% of all the people it’s harvesting data from.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM Build 7601.17514.101119-1850 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM are available for download here.

Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.