Windows 7 surpasses 50 percent global OS market share

Shawn Knight

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Recent data from analytics company StatCounter shows that Windows 7 has obtained more than half of the worldwide operating system market for the first time. The OS surpassed Windows XP as the most popular choice globally in October 2011 but it wasn’t until last month that it surpassed the 50 percent mark.

According to StatCounter, Windows Vista continues to hold the bronze medal for third place with 8.32 percent market share, although Mac OSX has been making a heavy push to capture this spot as of late, sitting at 7.05 percent at the end of June. If current trends continue, OSX will likely overtake Vista in the coming months.

windows pcs microsoft windows 7 market share

Of course this is only one company’s interpretation of stats, as Net Applications claims that Windows XP still holds a 43.61 percent share of the market. Their data indicated that XP is still the top dog, just barely edging out Windows 7 at 41.59 percent. Furthermore, Vista still holds a sizeable lead of 3.6 percent market share over OSX.

CNET highlights that despite launching nearly three years ago, Windows 7 has had a slower time achieving the same popularity as Windows XP. The main reason for this is that many businesses are still holding on to XP for dear life after seeing how bad Vista was. XP is generally considered to be stable and custom business applications built for the platform would likely need to be recoded to work on 7.

Microsoft will ending support for Windows XP in April 2014 and is encouraging legacy users to upgrade to Windows 7 ASAP.

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" The main reason for this is that many businesses are still holding on to XP for dear life after seeing how bad Vista was. XP is generally considered to be stable and custom business applications built for the platform would likely need to be recoded to work on 7."

The latter statement, not the former. Upgrading is very expensive and WinXP works great, so why change? Vista coulda been perfect, but it wouldn't have changed the fact that XP gets the job done very well.
 
That is why people keep writing code for Windows, every 3 or 4 years, they can sell it again to all their customers for the next version of Windows that comes out.
 
There is XP mode. Which last time I checked, was for businesses that faced software compatibility issues.
 
So wait, the failure that is Vista is more popular(by number) than OSX? Apple is robbing people blind, wow. If Apple ever gets to 90% instead of windows, I think Apple would be in control of all of the money in the world.
 
"after seeing how bad Vista was"

Vista was never bad, just ask the people who are using SP2 with stable drivers from Nvidia and ATI that both companies fail to deliver wen Vista was released, even if they had years to prepare.
 
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