Windows 7 Installed Base Finally Exceeds XP
Linked by David Adams on Mon 17th Oct 2011 17:29 UTC, submitted by Debjit
Windows Well, its not official yet, but Microsoft's Windows 7 has now become the most widely used operating system. . . Windows 7 now has a strong 40.21% share of all desktop operating systems around the world whereas, the usage share of Windows XP has slipped to 38.64%. All this happened a couple of days back (in October). The rise in usage of Windows 7 and the drop in usage of Windows XP has been consistent since the time Windows 7 was first launched.
E-mail Print r 0   43 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jh4
Permalink for comment 493305
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[4]: I don't believe that
by zima on Tue 18th Oct 2011 06:01 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: I don't believe that"
zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

Nevertheless, a few interesting twists:
i) Windows 7 has been globally encountered more often than Windows Vista for quite some time.

A natural consequence of far from enthusiastic Vista reception - similar with WinMe, it quickly vanished (and IMHO, it wasn't nearly so bad as popularly portrayed ...as long as one remembered what it was: still 9x of course, but a slightly too big departure from 98 & 98SE for all the old tricks to work - instead, they often broke the system)

In many areas, OS X is also more prevalent than Windows Vista.

How do you come to that conclusion? In areas from Statcounter, broken per continent*, OSX virtually doesn't exist in Africa, Asia, and South America. It's visible in Europe, but there Vista still has over 2x more than OSX. In North America, Vista still has a bit more.
Only in Oceania OSX has a bit more than Vista (but then, Win7 has there almost 2x more than XP; clearly a very atypical area)
So "many areas" would basically mean from two to few countries...

*though such regional breakdown is really awkward - it shouldn't follow geographical boundaries the way it does, but cultural and geopolitical ones.

So, for example, CIS countries in one group, counted separately from "Europe" (it would need some more politically correct name, EU or EEA being too narrow ;) ). Canada & US in one, Latin America in another. Australia & New Zealand separate from the rest of Oceania (right now those two countries most likely totally dominate the results)

iii) It would be more informative if the statistics could be broken down into the Home vs. Professional versions [...] This would tell general public vs. corporate base.

Not necessarily. I know of few places which hardly bothered with XP Home, for example - which seemed to be correlated with widespread piracy (no price difference there, and two versions would only complicate things?) - and they would be most likely also the places with much slower Win7 uptake.

iv) The low frequency of encounters of Linux based systems is rather puzzling - maybe the Linux users don't frequent the same sites as the rest of users?

This (and also institutional deployments) might play some role, but - look at the stats of Wikimedia, which I link nearby.

Generally - this, and your ii) point, probably boils down to people being quite satisfied with perfectly "good enough" OS which comes on their new PC (typically even even somewhat better than the Linux experience would be, especially considering familiarity factor; some negative experiences of Windows accepted as unavoidable part of computing, and its price being hidden)

Reply Parent Score: 3