News
Windows 7 Use Grows to One-Third of Global OS Market
- By Chris Paoli
- June 02, 2011
Windows 7 ended May with 33.22 percent of the global operating system market, according to data collected by StatCounter.
Between April and May, Microsoft's latest OS increased its share by 1.31 percent, continuing its steady growth since its release in October 2009.
Windows XP, which is scheduled to lose free security update support in April 2014, is still the leading OS with a worldwide market share of 45.83 percent, according to StatCounter's numbers. However, XP's share has declined as Windows 7's has grown. Windows 7's U.S. market share surpassed XP's in April, according to StatCounter.
Microsoft announced in April that it had sold 350 million licenses of Windows 7, the majority of these to consumers. As for enterprise migrations, an April survey by Unisys Corp. found that 25 percent of IT professionals were considering an upgrade to Windows 7, with 21 percent of respondents saying their enterprises have already started or finished making the move.
"Organizations discovered for the first time during the Vista era that they actually could skip an upgrade," said Sam Gross, Unisys' vice president for Global IT Outsourcing Solutions, during a recent phone interview. "IT said that we have something that's supportable and works, so we'll just sit this one out."
Third-party vendors are anticipating an impending wave of Windows 7 migrations, with several touting their XP-to-Windows-7 migration services at the recent Tech-Ed conference.
As for the rest of the worldwide OS market, StatCounter numbers show that Windows Vista, while still continuing to lose market share, is still in third place with 12.53 percent, a decrease of 6.93 percent year-over-year. Both Mac OS X and Linux have remained relatively stable, with market shares of 6.35 percent and 0.81 percent, respectively.
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| Courtesy: StatCounter |