Windows 7 has been out nearly 3 months to the day and I can’t remember any other operating system to date which has received as much praise as Windows 7. And well to be honest with you, the good news seems to just keep on rolling in for the the guys over at Redmond.
Windows 7, riding on the back of improving holiday sales has now managed to overtake every version of Mac OS X (10.4, 10.5 and 10.6) in terms of market share. It jumped from 4% to 5.71% in the month of December alone, overtaking Mac OS X at a mere 4.87%. An article over at Arstechnica shows us that Windows 7 is indeed taking off like a rocket, in its first month alone it was already at 4%. Compare this to, Windows Vista which only held 0.98% after a month. After two months Windows 7 has completely blown Windows Vista out of the water, holding 5.71% of the market compared to the mere 2.04% that Windows Vista held.
But it’s not all sunshine and roses for Microsoft, or Apple for that matter. Surprisingly, despite the strong PC sales over the holiday period. Between November and December 2009, Windows market share dropped 0.31 percentage points (from 92.52% to 92.21%), while Mac OS dipped 0.01 percentage points (from 5.12% to 5.11%). Remarkably the only OS to perform better was Linux, which moved forward 0.02 percentage points (from 1.00% to 1.02%)
Windows 7 also seems to be performing strongly in the gaming sector as well. Steam, one of the biggest PC gaming platforms, has reported seeing a rise in the number of PC’s running Windows 7 on it’s network with almost a quarter of it’s millions of users running Windows 7.
According to the December Steam survey, 23% of its users were running Windows 7, that’s still less than it’s 30% of users running Windows Vista, but given the fact that Windows 7 has only been out for two months at the time of this survey it’s putting up a strong fight to overtake Windows Vista. What’s interesting is that steam found that more Windows 7 PC’s were 64-bit than 32-bit, double the amount of 32-bit systems in fact.
See the table below for more info:
| Windows Version | Popularity |
|---|---|
| Windows XP 32 bit | (-3.20%) 44.77% |
| Windows Vista 32 bit | (-0.27%) 20.71% |
| Windows 7 64 bit | (+2.45%) 15.61% |
| Windows Vista 64 bit | (+0.81%) 10.00% |
| Windows 7 32 bit | (+0.02%) 7.45% |
| Windows XP 64 bit | (+0.19%) 0.64% |
| Windows 2003 64 bit | (+0.04%) 0.64% |
| Windows 2000 | (-0.01%) 0.10% |
| Other | (-0.03%) 0.08% |
So Windows 7 still appears to be performing strong it all sectors, however, I think Windows 7 will only truly become a success the day it over takes Windows XP.
What do you guys think?
Let us know in the comments
Source: Arstechnica, Hexus Gaming
As you say, Windows XP is W7′s real competition, especially in the corporate sector where most of the XP machines are still happily chugging along. I’m not too surprised regarding the gaming point, since most gamers who keep their pc’s updated generally fork out and get the latest Windows os for their new gear at the same time – A little like the corporate side of things, except at a much faster pace. I would be very surprised to see windows 7 at under 25% by the end of 2010.
I’m just going to be picky and point out spelling mistakes you ALWAYS do.
For example, the meaning “in it’s first month”, as you write it. Take a long, hard look there. What is it’s an abbreviation for? It is. “in it is first month”. Does that make sense? It does not.
Beware of the two it’s and its. Its = its and it’s = it is. When writing, ask yourself if it makes sense to place it is in the meaning. If it does, then it’s spelled it’s. Otherwise it’s its.
Essentia, i appreciate you pointing that out. I am aware of this but the reason I left it as “It’s” is because every time I do a spell and grammar check this is constantly highlighted if I have it as “its” but once I put in the apostrophe it’s satisfied. I’ve also seen this on other websites as well and I also asked my self the same question “is this correct?”
Regardless I believe you are correct so I have corrected the post