It’s been 18 months since Windows 7 hit retail availability and Microsoft will this week be celebrating the fact that it’s finally the most popular OS in the United States.
Thanks to low confidence in Windows Vista, many Windows users opted not to update from Windows XP, which meant the 10-year-old OS remained on top. However, according to statistics from StatCounter (via Royal Pingdom), Windows XP has finally been dethroned.
As of April, Windows XP accounts for 31.56 percent of the market, while the newer Windows 7 accounts for 31.71 percent. When Windows 7 launched, Windows XP accounted for nearly 50 percent of the market while Vista accounted for over 35 percent. Vista has since dropped to 19.07 percent. In fourth place is OS X, with 14.87 percent, while Linux comes in fifth with just .7 percent of the market.
Royal Pingdom reports that, while Windows 7 has surpassed XP in a number of countries (including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany), there’s still a ways to go when it comes to toppling XP as the worldwide King of OSes. Windows XP currently accounts for 46.87 percent of the worldwide market, while Windows 7 follows behind with 31.17 percent.
Windows 7’s success is somewhat overshadowed by this week’s leaks about the upcoming Windows 8. Recent evidence suggests we’ll see an app store integrated into the next iteration of Windows.
Otherwise one mostly relies on web server statistics.
My guess is the popularity of Win 7 is coming from new PC sales where customers don't have a choice to go with XP and are too lazy to downgrade themselves/start using Win 7 and find it acceptable. Fact is people are creatures of habit and if given a choice between learning something new that ostensibly doesn't do anything new we'll opt to stick with the thing we've already learned. And while we on THG consider an OS install to be beyond trivial, it's daunting for your average user.
The reason OSX is so slowly making headway in the desktop market is because Apple is a far costlier computer. For instance, compatible hardware between a Mac and a PC may render similar performance results, but the Mac will invariably be twice as much in price.
The reason Linux may not have a significant share of the PC market is because Microsoft has managed to ensure that OEM manufacturers pre-install only Windows and nothing but Windows into each machine that makes it to a shelf. Consumers have never had a choice.
In the end, Linux desktop market share is irrelevant since open source has its own environment sustained by a dedicated community of developers that are not beholden to any single corporation. In other words, the best minds around the globe are ensuring that Linux will stay cutting-edge for desktops and all other devices.
I will say unequivocally that OSX and Linux have proven to be far superior than Windows for desktops and laptops. Linux runs faster, more reliablly, and without the nightmarish viral maladies that have blighted Windows users for years. Which proves that popularity does not necessarily mean quality.
Windows can continue to dominate the desktop- but who really cares? Certainly not the Mac or Linux communities.
if you're using the word 'actual' including servers and smartphones as computing devices, linux is the king!
Microsoft could have re-released windows ME with out changing any of it's code and it would eventually beat windows xp in market share, simply because when people go into the store to buy a prebuilt system, it will come with windows ME.
What needs to be done is compare the active licenses for purchased copies of windows XP, to purchased copies of Windows 7. Preinstalled operating systems should never be counted as there is generally no choice in the matter for many people.
while most of us here may build our own computers, overall, probably 99.9% of computer users will purchase a prebuilt computer.
Another interesting thing is that most computer users don't even know which operating system their computer is running, and a few that I provide support for who know slightly more about their computers, will generally only make it as far as the name Windows, but often, will not know which version of Windows they are running.
gathering statistics on preinstalled operating systems is a very poor way to measure the popularity of an operating system, as for the average user, when they head into a store such as Best Buy(ripoff), in almost all cases, they are stuck with a choice of either a PC or a Mac, and if they go with the PC route then they are generally forced into getting whatever the current version of Windows that Microsoft is shipping out is.
On a modern computer, if windows XP is properly setup and the transition effects and other crap is disabled, the OS responds instantly to almost everything.
For most people, the OS run all of their programs and works well.
For those who do not understand the use of an OS, consider this question. If when microsoft released windows 7, they locked it down in such a way that the only software that you could run was what came preinstalled through the retail disk, and no other software could be installed. Would you still use windows 7?
The OS is basically an environment that you use in order to run the software of your choice. Windows XP still meets this task, with the exception of 2-3 PC games, which aren't that good.
While windows 7 has made some improvements, for what the average user does on heir computer, they can do it with both windows 7 and XP, which is why you probably wont find them buying a copy of windows 7 to upgrade the current OS on their PC, and when they actually get windows 7 will be when they purchase a new computer that comes with it preinstalled.
Counting preinstalled copies when calculating popularity or like for an OS, is like saying that more new computer users prefer the sasser worm to adobe photoshop because more new computer users had it installed as compared to adobe photoshop. (not comparing windows 7 to a worm, i am just using this to back up my argument of why preinstalled or installed with out the user having a say, is not a good indicator of how many people actually like or want it over windows xp)