Windows 7 Ripping Apart XP and Vista, Still

There is now less than a month until Windows 7’s one year anniversary since launch, and the latest iteration of the Windows client shows no signs that its growth is slowing down.

Fact is, that quite to the contrary, Windows 7 continues to rip apart its predecessors, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

According to statistics from Internet metrics company Net Applications, Windows 7 has managed to climb to as high as 17.10% of the operating system market at the end of September 2010.

The increase in market share comes largely at the expense of Windows XP and Windows Vista, with both platforms seeing a consistent decrease in usage following the release of Windows 7 on October 22nd, 2009.

Net Applications also reveals however, that the advent of Windows 7 impacted rivals Mac OS X and Linux, with the two competitor operating systems stagnating in terms of market share.

At the start of this month, Mac OS X was at 5.03%, while Linux stood at 0.85%, compared to 5.00% and 0.85% respectively in August 2010.

But as usual, Windows is the biggest competitor for Windows. Vista is down to just 13.35%, namely the same market share it had almost two years ago, in October 2008, just a few months short of two years since its General Availability deadline.

But according to Net Applications, Vista peaked at 18.83% in October 2009, just as Windows 7 was released.

This means that by the end of this month, in its first year on the market Windows 7 will have had more users than Vista after three years since release.

Still, there is another, perhaps more important aspect of Windows 7’s impressive growth, namely the erosion of XP.

Windows XP was at 70.48% in October 2009. Since the launch of Windows 7, XP lost over 10% market share.

XP dropped to a low 60.03% at the end of September 2010, and it appears that more and more users are starting to abandon the aging operating system in favor of the new, fast and lean Windows 7.

Back in July 2010, Microsoft revealed that it had sold in excess of 175 million copies of Windows 7. Certainly, with the time passed since then, Windows 7 has sold over 200 million licenses worldwide.

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