Windows 7 still has a long way to go to reach the first milestone of its life on the operating system market, namely 1%, but the fact  is that the next iteration of Windows has entered the OS market share measuring context. In just the first month since the public downloads of Windows 7 client Beta and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta(Windows 7 Server Beta) were made available for download, the platform has grown to an usage share of 0.10%, according to statistics provided by Net Applications. The Beta builds for Windows 7 client and server platforms went live on January 10, 2009, and will remain so until February 10.

“The Windows 7 beta releases in January have led to a spike in usage share. Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays. In contrast, Windows XP has an inverse trendline. XP's share is higher on weekdays due to Microsoft's relatively high business vs. residential share of Windows XP,” Net Applications stated. “This is an indication of strong interest in Windows 7, since it does not come pre-installed on a computer like Vista. Beta users are taking the time and effort to install it on their home computers, since corporations generally prohibit beta operating systems to be used in production environments.”

Between December 2008 and January 2009, Vista managed a consistent jump in terms of market share, growing from 21.12% to 22.48%. However, Windows 7 and Windows Vista increasing their audience, the installed base of Windows continued to drop. Overall, the share of the Windows operating systems on the market dropped from 88.68% to just 88.26% between December 2008 and January 2009, this primarily to Windows XP, which continued on its downward trajectory. XP is now down at 63.76% in January 2009, compared to 65.22% in December of the past year.

However, Apple's Mac OS X benefited from strong growth, which has put the operating system on the verge of the 10% milestone, but not quite there. Mac OS X is now at 9.93%, up from 9.63% a month ago, and will pass the 10% mark next month if it continues to grow by the same trend. The same cannot be said for Linux. The open source platform has lost market share in the first month of this year, going back to the same percentage as in November 2008, namely 0.83%, down from 0.85% in December.

Windows 7 Beta is available for download here.

Product keys to activate Windows 7 Beta are available here.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (Windows 7 Server Beta) is available for download here.