Vista’s successor has passed the 10% usage share mark

Apr 1, 2010 13:04 GMT  ·  By

At the end of March 2010, there were twice as many computers running Windows 7 as machines with Mac OS X installed, although the latest iteration of the Windows client was released to the market just five months ago. According to statistics from Net Applications, Windows 7 currently accounts for no less than 10.23% of the OS market, having grown from 8.92% at the end of February 2010. The data provided by the Internet metrics company also indicates that Windows 7’s market share is tenfold that of all Linux distributions put together. The Linux market share grew from 0.98% to 1.03% in the past two months, that of Mac OS X from 5.02% to 5.33%.

Both Linux and OS X suffered decreases in their respective share of the OS market between January and February, the first time in almost half a year when the overall share of Windows grew. Fact is that both the adoption rates of Mac OS X and Linux have been dwarfed by the explosive uptake of Windows 7. And, provided that sales of the latest version of Windows continue at the same pace, Windows 7 will gallop past its predecessor soon enough.

Windows Vista is currently down to just 16.01%, almost at the same level as in February 2009, two entire years after the operating system hit the store shelves. Vista did not hit the 10% market share milestone until May 2008, a whole 15 months after GA. A simple comparison reveals that Windows 7 adoption is three times that of Vista. But while Vista dropped from 16.51% to 16.01%, Windows XP’s loss was a tad more steep. XP is currently down to just 64.46% from 65.49% in February 2010.

A recent report by Forrester Research indicates that the vast majority of customers that have upgraded to Windows 7 are very satisfied with the move they made. Microsoft is also doing its part, and is allowing IT professionals in particular, but all users essentially, to download a free copy of Windows 7 Enterprise and test it for free for a 90-day trial period. The availability of the free edition of Windows 7 was prolonged until December 31st, 2010.

“People move to a new OS one of two ways: either by buying a new PC or upgrading an existing PC. In the past, most people simply purchased a new PC to get a new version of Windows. With Windows 7, the data in the [Forrester] reports show that upgrading existing PCs was a much stronger trend with Windows 7. In the end, the reports show that early adopters who upgraded to Windows 7 were quite satisfied. Exciting to see the progress,” Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, revealed.

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images are available for download here.

Microsoft Windows 7 90-Day Eval VHD is available for download here.
Another Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download
here.

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