At almost six months since it was initially introduced to the public in Beta stage, Windows 7 has gathered an audience almost half the size of all distributions of Linux available on the market, according to statistics from Net Applications. While Linux is flirting with the 1% usage share mark, Windows 7 has grown to no less than 0.42% of the operating system market. And with the next iteration of Windows now at Release Candidate stage the market share ballet against Linux, Mac OS and earlier releases of Windows is only in the first act.

Windows is down yet again at the end of May 2009, accounting for a usage share of 87.75%. With just XP and Vista available on the market, Microsoft has continued losing market share. XP dropped from 62.21% in April 2009 to just 61.54%, but Vista is not using the context created by the aging operating system to its advantage. XP's successor only jumped from 23.90% to 24.35% from April to May 2009. And considering that Widows 7 will be made available to the general public ahead of the 2009 holiday season, Vista will never hit the 30% market share mark.

Mac OS slightly increased its installed base, to 9.81% at the end of the past month compared to 9.73% in April, in the context in which Apple's operating system seems to have stopped its steady growth. Mac OS X went as high as 9.93% in January 2009 and it was looking like the 10% mark would be beat soon, but that wasn't the case, with the platform's usage share fluctuating for the past months, a situation sufficient to keep the OS under 10%. At the end of April 2009, Linux climbed over 1% of the market, just barely to 1.02%, but the following month the open-source operating system lost a few percentage points, and is now down to 0.99%.

Microsoft started offering Windows 7 Beta Build 7100 at the beginning of January 2009, and the Release Candidate bits on May 5th. Windows 7 RC Build 7100 continues to be up for grabs even at this point in time, and judging by its market share approximately three to four million users worldwide are running the operating system.

32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 (Release Candidate) RC Build 7100.0.090421-1700 is available for download here.