Windows 7 gathering momentum

Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 January 2010 10:15

IT Industry - Development

Windows 7 uptake is on a roll, if web statistics are any guide.

Net Applications' Market Share report for December 2009 shows Windows 7 was responsible for more than 5% of web traffic.

Windows 7's share was 2.15% in October, 4.00% in November, and 5.71% in December.

The December figure was more than the total for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and all flavours of Linux.

Windows 7 appears to be taking disproportionately more share from Vista than XP, presumably because most computers that meet Vista's hardware requirements are also capable of running Windows 7 successfully.

It's a different story with older machines that are still running XP.

And with XP still accounting for more than two-thirds of the web traffic measured by Net Applications, indications are that large corporate and educational sites aren't rushing to the new operating system.

Vista usage peaked in October, and it is likely that the trend towards Windows 7 will continue in January 2010 as all those new computers purchased as Christmas presents or in the post-Christmas sales show up in the statistics.