Windows 7: Windows 7 has nearly caught Vista in worldwide installs

According to W3Schools.com, Windows 7 has nearly caught up to Vista in the number of installations worldwide.

Last September Vista had a worldwide high market share of 18.3%, while XP enjoyed a 65.2% share. Just last month (Feb 2010) Windows 7 moved up to a market share of 13.0%, while Vista dropped to 14.4%, and the biggest hit came to XP who dropped to a share of 58.4%. See the data here: OS Statistics

Another interesting fact is that XP had a high market share of 76.1% back in January of 2007... the month Vista was released.

There are many presumptions that one can make from these figures, but surely many Vista users have upgraded to 7, as well as many XP users who first upgraded to Vista then 7.

The question is what % of these XP users have finally given up on their old slow systems and gone out and purchased a new system preloaded with Windows 7...???

Long live Windows 7!

Darryl,
For me I was an XP guy, who never liked Vista, and I was reluctant to try 7 the first month it came out. While looking at Netbooks, I bought an Xp version of the ACer Aspire, because the 11" one I liked only came with Vista, and an Atom Proc and 1GB of RAM and was horrendously slow, much much slower than the XP 10". A month later though, Acer made the 11" with 7, upgraded to Intel Core Solo proc and 2GB of RAM. I returned my 10", and bought the 11". I was so impressed that I upgraded my XP desktop at home that week. Windows 7 is the best OS I have used so far.

Hardly surprising really when you consider the press they both received.

Vista gets beat to a pulp and seven receives all the acclaim.

Even pre sp1 I never had a problem with vista.

Seven for me is way better though so..............

i agree, Vista was ok, but therein lies its problem, its only "ok" whereas 7 is, in a word, awesome, given the choice, id always choose windows 7 over any other OS, its just simple things, like super search, pinning your programs to the taskbar, aero snap, it just makes you go "well this isnt exactly radical why didnt anyone think of this before?"

Vista IMO was almost like a beta of 7, it laid the framework for what was to come, and certain features (again the search bar springs to mind as an example) just felt unfinished,

having said that, if i were forced to go back to Vista, once id adjusted to its way of doing things again, i wouldnt grumble too hard,

I ran Vista from 1/31/07 here for 2 1/2yrs. and know some that were reluctant to get into 7 having been satisfied with the previous version. They actually shunned XP having gone from 2000 into Vista and well received 7 so far!

With 7 even the beta builds and RCs were a strong improvement after having run the RC1 for Vista and deciding to wait for the retail version there. Where XP would have been reinstalled full 3 times with a fresh start the 7 64bit RC was literally put through the mill for a full 6 months showing the SP1 for 7 will even offer the better OS an additional edge!

Honestly, I never had any big problems with Vista. True, some driver support dropped, which happens with every new OS release. So a few old HW devices no longer worked with it. No SW issues at all, again other than my AV not being Vista compliant. So nothing that out of the norm for an OS upgrade to me. I've been upgrading OS's since DOS 5.0 days... seen em all since.

My biggest problem with Vista was UAC. If I'm the admin, on MY PC... I dont want to be asked if I want to install something when I just double clicked on an .exe. Of course I do! I, like many, hated the UAC so much I just turned it off.

I dont see as much restriction with the Windows 7 UAC... its much less obtrusive. So much so that I leave it on at stock seetings. I would, however, in the future like to see a "Power User" setting that would stop the occasional "Are you sure..." messages.

I also feel like Windows 7 is, without a doubt, the best OS MS has ever released... it's beautiful, fast, leaner... MS has definately raised the bar. But can they keep this trend going?

It will be exciting to see if MS can keep this level of quality going into future service packs and future releases of Windows 8, 9, etc.

Please no more Windows ME/Vista debacles!

With Vista I waited a full year following the release to see an updated driver set/application for the rv tuner card now on the discontinued list since 7 has been out. I was forced to run an XP/Vista dual boot for that and a few older programs which surprizingly work like champs on the 32bit 7!

Vista was certainly a much needed improvement over all the Blue Screens and lockups seen with XP since Vista offered an improved crash control further improved with 7 as well as being a more stable OS while plagued with the increased size everyone moaned about.

I know some business owners who were actually reluctant to move into 7 being satisfied with Vista for these reasons. They still keep Vista on! as well as now running 7. The one thing making 7 sales progressive seeing this fast of upgrade on a large scale is the obvious rapore 7 testers found as well as the word getting out once the RCs were made public! 7 has had a much better start off then previous versions.

Hi there
You can level criticisms about XP -- fair enough but it certainly wasn't a SLOW operating system.

It was relatively easy to tweak and remember you are often talking about people running this stuff on hardware nearly 10 years old in some cases -- this is "Light Years ago" in terms of hardware development so the "slowness" of XP wasn't really a valid point.

I LIKE Windows 7 -- but there are still features in XP that aren't all bad either - and some legacy programs and hardware STILL need XP to run on -- I use Virtual machines to solve that problem.

Vista was the real issue as it came out too soon and was often run on inadequate hardware - plus the real gripe of the UAC annoying users with stupid prompts everytime they wanted to do anything on their machines.

I think you'll find that even when VISTA has long vanished into "The Dustbin of History" there will STILL be a significant number of XP machines around.

Windows 7 is certainly the Best yet -- no argument there -- but for millions of people XP was when WINDOWS finally matured into something realistic enough to be used by "the masses".

Windows 2000 was certainly an excellent system but there again at the time it needed better hardware than was generally cheaply available - hence the horror that was Windows 98 (and even worse Windows Millenium). However a lot of the really good design points in Windows 2000 are still incorporated into Windows 7 so it's an evolving process.

How MS will "Trump" Windows 7 with their next Windows will certainly be interesting -- it will have to be much more than a "mild facelift" to give it the wow factor that Windows 7 received at launch.

Cheers
jimbo

Vista was a good OS but when it was released people didn't have the required hardware and software vendors did not have compatible software yet

Windows 98 a horror? Hmmmm I dont agree. 98 was stable as hell on HW of that era...

Plus Win98 came out after NT4.0 and before Win2000. Not vice-a-versa as you stated. Hence the names Win98 vs Win2000...???

In many admins and power users minds Win 98 was really an update of Win95... Many of us saw 98 as little more than a service pack. Very similar to where we are today... Windows 7 is an update of Vista, same core components, same kernel, etc...