Microsoft just announced that it has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7, and that the OS is selling at a pace of seven per second. Not bad for an OS that was launched just eight months ago.
At that pace, Windows 7 will rapidly be gaining market share. So how is it doing compared to its older siblings, Windows Vista and Windows XP?
Here’s a graph showing how the overall market shares for these three operating systems have changed over the last 12 months:
There are two amazing observations to take away from this chart:
- Windows 7 looks set to overtake Vista within one or at the most two months.
- Windows XP is still king of the hill with a dominating 58% share of the OS market.
So, Windows 7 will have overtaken Vista after being on the market for less than a year, which is impressive, but it will clearly take much longer before it replaces Windows XP as the dominant version of Windows. Keep in mind that Windows XP is already ancient; it was launched in October 2001 and apparently still refuses to let go.
Back in February we showed that Windows 7 was generating a public interest far greater than Vista ever was able to do. We also asked the question: “How long will it take for Windows 7 to overtake Vista in actual market share?”
Now we know.
Data source: The OS market share numbers come from StatCounter and are based on visitor stats from more than three million websites.
