Windows 7 already used more than Vista
By Jenny • Aug 3rd, 2010 • Category: software
- Photo: gynti_46 / Flickr
It was inevitable that the unmitigated success that is Windows 7 would soon pass the unmitigated disaster that was Windows Vista. That has now happened, with research indicating Microsoft’s latest OS is installed on more computers than its predecessor.
Windows market share breakdown
Research by Net Applications indicates that Windows 7 has 14.46 per cent of the global OS market share, leaping past the 14.34 per cent Windows Vista accounts for. What makes this particularly remarkable is that Windows 7 has only been around for less than a year – closer to 10 months, in fact.
However, Windows 7 celebration and ubiquity aside, Microsoft latest OS has a long way to go before it even gets a look at XP. Arguably Microsoft’s most significant operating system in terms of impact, Windows XP holds 61.97 per cent of the worldwide OS market share, which is more than four times that of Windows 7. Collectively, Microsoft’s OSes has over 91 per cent of the operating system market.
Everybody else’s market share breakdown
Mac OS X, the operating system found in Apple laptops and desktops, holds about 5 per cent of the global OS market share, sliding for the fourth consecutive month and 0.3 per cent off its lifetime peak of 5.3 per cent. That’s not to say that Macs are no longer selling, because they are selling like hot cakes, it is to say that PCs are outselling them and the abandonment rate of other Windows OSes for Windows 7 is accelerating.
Down the pecking order, open source operating system Linux accounted for 1 per cent of the global operating system market share. Just below Linux, believe it or not, is Apple’s iOS operating system that now accounts for 0.7 per cent of OS market share across the globe. That’s a ton of iPhones, iPads and iPods being sold.
Research methodology
The study, which was compiled by web analytics firm Net Applications, was compiled by monitoring the visitors to websites that are clients of the firm. This amounted to around 160 million visitors across over 40,000 websites Net Applications monitors on clients’ behalves.
And while we often dismiss some studies for being statistically unsound, the sample size hear is simply too big to ignore.
Tags for this article: windows 7, windows vista
