Is Windows 7 taking web share from XP or Vista?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 04:01

IT Industry - Development

The use of Windows 7 has clearly picked up since its official launch, but is the growth coming at the expense of XP or Vista?

Rival web analytics firms disagree about whether Windows 7 is displacing XP or Vista. But they agree that Windows total web share fell in the month that the latest version was released.

According to web analytics company StatCounter, Windows 7 is taking web share largely from Vista rather than XP.

"Windows 7 has hit the ground running and the underlying trend is positive for Microsoft," said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, but he pointed out that Windows 7's growth was largely at the expense of Vista: "In the US Vista has declined from 35.78% to 34.52% at the end of October. XP has seen a smaller fall from 48.92% to 48.47%."

The web share of Windows 7 grew from 1.75% to 2.82%.

StatCounter's worldwide figures for the same period show Vista declining from 23.84% to 23.16%, XP from 67.53% to 67.16%. Windows 7's share grew from 2.02% to 2.82%.

Despite Cullen's reference to a positive underlying trend for Microsoft, the combined US web share for Windows 7, Vista and XP fell by 0.64 percentage points. Its worldwide share fell by 0.25 points.

But that's not the whole story, so please read on.