Windows 7 over a third; XP less than half
Microsoft's Windows 7 is continuing its relentless climb, and now has over a third of the desktop operating system market, as measured by a NetApplications. Meanwhile, Windows XP is continuing its relentless decline, and now has less than half of the market. XP has dropped more than 20 percentage points over the past two years, though it's somewhat surprising how many companies are still using this venerable 10-year-old operating system.
According to NetApplications' numbers for Desktop Top Operating System Share Trends, XP had 48.03 percent of the market in October, followed by Windows 7 with 34.62 percent, Windows Vista with 8.85 percent, and Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 with 3.62 percent.
Over the past couple of months, XP has lost a couple of points of market share, rather than one, which may indicate an acceleration in its decline. If so, Windows 7 could overtake XP within the next four months.
Most large companies now seem to be upgrading to Windows 7, which may explain XP's accelerated decline.
According to the rival StatCounter figures for October, Windows 7 overtook XP this month. StatCounter now has Windows 7 at 40.5 percent (up from 39 percent in September) with XP at 38.5 percent (down from 40.6 percent in September). StatCounter also credits Windows Vista with a slightly higher market share: 11.18 percent (a slight increase on last month) versus 8.85 percent.
According to NetApplications, Linux has a market share of 1.19 percent, while StatCounter credits the free operating system with 0.84 percent. If true, Windows 7 added more users in the past month than Linux has managed in the past 10 years.