Windows 7 Breathing Down Vista’s Neck While Eating Away At XP

It won’t be long until Windows 7 overtakes Windows Vista in terms of market share. In fact, the latest iteration of the Windows client is now breathing down its predecessor’s neck, while convincing more and more Windows users to jump ship. In fact, if Windows 7 continues to perform the way it has so far, the operating system will enjoy a market share greater than Vista’s in under a year since launch.

Vista has been on a downward trend since October 2009, when Windows 7 hit the store shelves. According to statistics made available by Net Applications, Vista’s usage share decreased from 18.83%, in the month of Windows 7’s General Availability deadline, to a low of 15.26% at the end of May 2010. In just its first seven months on the market, Windows 7 has grabbed no less than 12.67% of the OS market, and is poised to become the second most used operating system worldwide in just two to three months.

Of course, the largest impediment standing in the way of Windows 7’s growth is not Vista, or any rival platform, but Windows XP. According to Net Applications, XP still owns a massive 62.53% of the market. However, the OS released in 2001 is losing terrain fast in favor of Windows 7, faster than Vista. Between April and May 2010, XP dropped from 63.41% to 62.53%. Back in October 2009, XP was well over 70% of the market, but Windows 7 needed only a single month to take the nearly decade-old platform under that mark.

The fact that Windows 7 is eating away at its precursors is evident, especially this month. Because both XP and Vista have experienced smaller-than-usual drops in usage share, May 2010 is the first month since October 2009 in which Windows 7’s share increased by less than 1%. Between April and May, Mac OS X’s usage share dropped from 5.32% to 5.27%, while Linux experienced a consistent growth from 1.05% to 1.13%, the open source platform climbing to the highest market share in the past year.

Microsoft Windows 7 90-Day Eval VHD is available for download here.
Another Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.