News
Report: Windows 7's Market Share Closes Gap on XP
- By Chris Paoli
- March 02, 2012
Windows 7 is gaining on the aging Windows XP operating system, according to the latest market share estimates from Net Applications.
Though XP is still the No. 1 OS in the world, its market share dropped by 1.8 percent in February to finish at 45.39 percent. XP was unable to build on its success in January, when its market share rose for the first time in over two years.
In second place, Windows 7 closed February with a worldwide market share of 38.12 percent, an increase of 1.72 percent over January. If this trend continues, Windows 7's market share could overtake XP's sometime this summer.
Windows Vista maintained its third-place position, even though its share dropped by 0.12 percent in February to finish at 8.10 percent. Trailing Vista by 5.5 percentage points is Apple's Mac OS X 10.6.
Windows 8, Microsoft's forthcoming OS, has already claimed .02 percent of the worldwide market, despite only being available as a developer preview until very recently. Last week's release of the more feature-rich Windows 8 "consumer preview" should boost the platform's market share significantly by the end of March. Indeed, the consumer preview was downloaded 1 million times just 24 hours after its release, according to Microsoft's Building Windows 8 Twitter account.
Microsoft's overall market share for its Windows brand was 91.92 percent in February.
| OS |
Market Share (February 2012) |
% Change |
| Windows XP |
45.39%
|
-1.80 |
| Windows 7 |
38.12% |
+1.70 |
| Windows Vista |
8.10% |
-0.12 |
| Mac OS X 10.6 |
3.00% |
+0.05 |
| Mac OS X 10.7 |
2.69% |
+0.51 |
| Other |
2.70% |
-0.36 |
Figures courtesy of Net Applications.