Windows 7: Windows 7 Gaining Market Share over Windows XP

The statistics are in. According to the Steam Hardware Survey of April 2010 the operating system that has the biggest share of the market is 32 bit Win XP. This operating system currently has 36 percent of the market. That is probably not a surprise as consumers and businesses haven’t completely endorsed the move to Windows 7. However, over a period of one month Windows XP lost 2.6 percent of the market share. And guess to whom.

That’s right Windows 7. However, what is surprising is that the Windows 7, 64 bit platform is now second, with just over 26 percent of the market. WinXP lost market share, and by an almost identical amount, Windows 7 gained as much.

More info here: Which OS has the biggest market share | Windows 7 News

What is also interesting is that the other 2 Windows 64 bit operating systems, Windows Vista, and Windows XP gained share last month.

Curious, more than interesting.

While it's now true that most OEMs are defaulting to Win 7 x64 on all but their cheapest boxes. I'd still hesitate to draw conclusions from these results and call it applicable to the overall installed base.

Why? The source data comes from Steam, and is therefore based on users of their system. Certainly valuable, and you can easily make a case it's representative of the gaming community. Hence the rapid growth of 64 bit Win 7. Given that it supports the heavier duty configurations which are preferred in this environment (4+ GB RAM, Crossfire/SLI, etc..) without running into address space limitations, the gaming community have clearly chosen 64 bit as the way forward from XP. And if you're going 64 bit, then Win 7 is the obvious/only choice.

But the needs of gamers are different from the needs of most (casual/business) users. (For example, my company is moving to a Server 2008/Citrix/Thin Client environment. No XP replacement, unless you have to have a laptop because you travel on company business. Else = Toaster. Eventually nobody will be using XP, sure. But by the same token very few will be using 7 either.)

XP x64 gained? Who knew?

Yah - XP 64 gained - Keep in mind that Steam's environment is all Gamers. And while 64 bit may be "The Way Forward" to support heavier desktop configurations, not all of them will be comfortable moving to Vista or Win 7. Indeed, (some) gamers were certainly the strongest opponents to Vista.

I work for a Fortune 500 company that designs and manufactures high-tech products. The division I work for specializes in smart state-of-art devices and systems. This is not consumer stuff. Other divisions make consumer products. With a few special expections, all desktop and laptop computers are running 32-bit XP Professional SP2, not SP3. We only recently got off of IE6 and upgraded to IE7, not IE8. At the same time, we upgraded to Office 2007. The company sees no good reason to upgrade the OS in our computers. From a business perspective, I agree. XP works just fine. I'm not totally sure why we got Office 2007. It was a surprise. Since we lease most of our computers, they are regularly replaced with new ones. They come from Dell with no OS, or are downgraded to XP, and then IT puts a standard XP load on the hard drive, which includes WinZIP, of all things. It is not uncommon to see a machine with a Vista license sticker on the case. I'm waiting to see one with a Windows 7 license sticker. My employer is interested in making money. As long as XP works for what we do, we will be using XP. I expect to retire from here before we see Windows 7 as standard issue.

At home I run Windows 7 Ultimate on most machines. The grandkid's laptops are running Windows 7 Home Premium, and I still run Windows Server 2003 on my server box. There is also a sprinkling of dual-boots with ubuntu.

Bye.

Which version of Ubuntu? Do you use it for something specific?

I currently dual-boot into kubuntu 8.10 on two systems for doing embedded Linux developement on a Digi ConnectCore™ 9M 2443 developement board. I did that to make myself more marketable as an embedded software engineer when I was out of work last year. On two others I dual-boot into ubuntu 9.10 so I can speak from experience that Linux is not the grace of god, but a decent operating system that has it's flaws, albeit, generally different from Windows flaws.

Bye.