Windows 7 Growing Faster Than Vista – Overtakes Mac OS X & Popular Among Gamers

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.

In A Table below you can see the windows version and its current popularity:

Windows Version -------------------- Popularity - Down/Drop

Windows XP 32 bit ------------- 44.77% (-3.20%)
Windows Vista 32 bit ------------- 20.71% (-0.27%)
Windows 7 64 bit --------------- 15.61% (+2.45%)
Windows Vista 64 bit ------------- 10.00% (+0.81%)
Windows 7 32 bit ---------------- 7.45% (+0.02%)
Windows XP 64 bit -------------- 0.64% (+0.19%)
Windows 2003 64 bit ------------ 0.64% (+0.04%)
Windows 2000 ------------------ 0.10% (-0.01%)
Others --------------------------- 0.08% (-0.03%)

Globally top 5 Operating System in the world (08 Dec Jan 10)
Operating System------------- Market Share

Windows XP ------------------ 69.48%
Windows Vista ----------------- 21.79%
Mac OS X -------------------- 4.3%
Windows 7 -------------------- 2.22%
Linux ------------------------- 0.68%
Other -------------------------- 1.53%
Sorce: Statcounter

SOURCE

Very useful information! Windows 7 is on a roll, regardless of anyone who believes otherwise. There will be holdouts, but eventually these older systems (mostly 32 bit) will break, and it will cost less to buy a new system, than to fix an old one. It will be interesting to see the refreshed version of those stats at the end of 2010.

Cat wrote Yep let Windows 7 get 12 months under its belt and i think we will see quit a rise in Windows 7 users