Windows 7 Selling Well After Launch, Bigger Market Share Than OS X

Windows 7 has been on the market for over a full quarter now, so it's about time for a check on how the OS is doing. According to figures from Net Applications, the system looks to be doing quite well. So well, in fact, that the growth rate is making Vista's old launch growth rate look mighty bad in comparison.

A peek at the worldwide OS market share from December 2009 shows that Windows as a whole is around 92%. Really though, that's not the story. Windows has had over 90% of the overall operating system share for many, many years, but it's the rapid increase of Windows 7 users that is really of interest. If you look at the first small window of time after launch, you'll see that Win7 is skyrocketing up the charts, whereas Vista's was more of a slow climb. A few factors are involved. For one, Windows 7 was launched just before the holiday buying season began, which surely helped convince people to upgrade who may have otherwise waited. Also, Vista had a rather sour reputation, whereas Windows 7 was seen as the "Vista that should have been." There's no better way to get people to upgrade than to give them a product that's significantly better than the prior version.



When looking specifically at one month after launch, Vista had just 0.93% of the overall market share. Windows 7 had 4%. After two months, Vista was at 2.04%. Windows 7 got up to 5.71%. Clearly, Win7 had a great draw at launch, and now the OS alone has more market share than all versions of Mac OS X combined. Not too shabby, huh?