Slowly but surely, Windows Vista is leaving its rivals in the dust and making its way to the top. In terms of growth, neither Mac OS X nor Linux have been capable of keeping up with it. And following the introduction of SP1, there is only Windows XP Service Pack 3 standing between the Vista and the lion's share of the operating system market currently owned by XP SP2. According to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Vista's install base hit 100 million users just ahead of 2008. So, with over 100 million Vista licenses at the back, Vista SP1 has already got quite a momentum. Still, it also needs not only to build its own, but also to increase whatever it inherits from Vista RTM.

Microsoft's perspective over Vista, ever since the operating system was initially introduced in November 2006 and then in January 2007, was that ignoring the operating system was a move equivalent with ignoring the inevitable. Throughout 2007, following the January consumer launch, Vista has been slowly growing in terms of market share. The growth of the latest Windows platform was inevitably synonymous with the erosion of Windows XP's market share, as end users made the jump from to Vista.

Statistics provided by Net Applications reveal that, at the end of February 2008, Vista has climbed all the way to 12.92% of the OS market. At the same time, XP dropped to just 74.47%. Mac OS X is up all the way to 7.46%, but has seen its share slip from 7.57%, while Linux is eternally stagnating at some 0.6% of the market. Vista's jump in February was a consistent, and almost full 1%, up from 11.97% in January, and almost at 13%, this means that in just two months Vista has added some 30 million users, and is now enjoying an install base of over 130 million.

Mid-March will see the general availability of Vista SP1, then starting in April, Microsoft will drop the service pack via Automatic Updates. In April, Vista SP1 will also start appearing pre-loaded on OEM machines and as a standalone retail product. The Redmond company has already announced that the price of Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate will drop by a maximum of 48% in some markets around the world, a reduction that will coincide with Vista SP1's general availability.

Vista SP1 plus a 48% discount on the Home Premium and Ultimate SKUs of the operating system sounds like a sweet deal however you want to look at it, but Windows XP is getting XP SP3. And while the third and final service pack for XP is but an insignificant step up from XP SP2 rather than an actual evolution, it will still manage to maintain the inertia of XP users and keep them stuck on an operating system released in 2001.