May 2, 2011 13:58 GMT  ·  By

With end of life deadline looming on the horizon, and Windows 7 available to deliver an immensely superior experience, Windows XP’s market share has been diminishing rapidly. Windows XP continues to be the dominant operating system worldwide, but its dominance is dwindling.

And if the current trends continue, next month there will be one Windows 7 user for each two customers running XP.

According to Net Applications, Windows 7’s usage share has increased yet again to 25.11% in April 2011 from 24.17% the previous month.

This should not be a real surprise, especially considering that Microsoft announced recently sales of over 350 million licenses of Windows 7.

Between March and April 2011 Windows Vista lost usage share, dropping from 10.56% to 10.22%. XP continues on its downward trend, with its share shrinking from 54.39% to 53.18% over the past two months.

Overall, between March and April, Windows continued to lose market share and is now down to 88.91% from 89.58%.

According to market analyst firm Gartner, Microsoft’s Windows platform is still by far, top dog when it comes down to operating system revenues.

With 78.6 percent market share, Windows client and server produced $23.8 billion in revenue the past year, up from just $21.9 billion the year before.

According to Gartner, operating system revenue totaled $30.4 billion last year around the world, with Windows being responsible for the vast majority.

“Microsoft's Windows (client) business had higher growth at 9.2 percent, compared with its Windows (server) business at 7.5 percent growth,” Gartner reported.

“A new wave of PC refreshment after the economic recession was the major reason for the better-performing Windows (client) business.

“Windows 7 also gained market acceptance as the successor to Windows Vista and XP. The projected EOL of XP in early 2014 drove enterprises to accelerate migration to Windows 7 in the second half of 2010.”

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.

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