Video available from the Redmond company

Jul 16, 2010 12:41 GMT  ·  By

Just as it was the case for Windows Vista, Windows 7’s main rival is not Linux, Mac OS X or any competitor operating system, but the Windows XP platform. Because of Microsoft’s support lifecycle for its products, Windows OSes often overlap. In this context, Microsoft needs to labor continuously to convince users of older releases of Windows to upgrade to the latest iteration. This is without a doubt the seed that generated the Windows XP vs. Windows 7 comparison put together by Microsoft.

The Windows XP vs. Windows 7 video is available on Windows.com for your viewing pleasure. In addition, the software giant has also compared the two operating systems side by side in a list designed to highlight the new and evolved features of Windows 7 over what Vista and XP had to offer before it.

According to statistics from Net Applications, Windows 7 has grown to a market share of 13.70% since the October 22nd, 2009 launch, taking Vista down to 14.68% and XP to 62.43%. Obviously, there is still enough place for Windows 7 to increase its share of the OS market worldwide, especially if the platform continues to erode the dominance of XP.

Microsoft has deemed Windows 7 as the most successful Windows release thus far. The company underlined recently that no less than 7 copies of Windows 7 are being sold each second, and that the number of licenses that were pushed to customers worldwide surpassed the 150 million milestone.

“Of our install base 85 percent is still running XP or Vista, 80 or earlier, 85 percent, 52 percent are running old version of the browser, 63 percent are running old versions of Office. Think about the revenue opportunity that we have with this refresh opportunity in our triple play of Windows 7, IE 8 and 9, and Office 2010,” said Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 earlier this week.

I’m curios whether the Windows XP vs. Windows 7 video comparison will cause any XP users to switch to Windows 7. Please leave a comment below. Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.

Follow me on Twitter @MariusOiaga.