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 terrible 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 incredible 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 by now 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 questioned the question: “How long will it take for Windows 7 to overtake Vista in actual market share?”
Now we know.
