By year's end: Windows 7 on nearly half of all PCs

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 09 August 2011 18:34

Your IT - Home IT

With 94% or almost 635m new PCs shipped by the end of 2011 to come with Windows 7, and on 42% of all PCs in total, Microsoft's Vista replacement is slowly but surely making its way up the charts, as Apple posts small gains and Linux based operating systems remain 'niche'.

Microsoft may have gotten a very deserved bad rap over its vexing Vista, but things have certainly changed in the era of Windows 7.

Windows 7 was a dramatic improvement over Windows Vista, showing how small the small gap was between great and galling, and how long it can take for that gap to be bridged and the bugs and badness banished.

Windows 7 isn't perfect, of course, but as clearly the best version of Windows yet, it has received the welcome and corporate blessing that Vista struggled to achieve but could never quite reach.

Microsoft has even shown us a tempting sneak peek of what Windows 8 should look like, complete with tile-based tablet UI that fluidly delivers multi-app experiences on the same screen while working with fingers, styluses, keyboards, mice and other standard peripherals, and even including an Windows 7 mode so all your current apps survive the transition to the world of modern tablets.

Although the first beta of Windows 8 is due sometime this year and will likely be quickly snapped up by the ultra-early adopting geekerati to test out Microsoft's true tablet-optimised experience, and despite beta code, the claim that Windows 8 will happily work on any machine that runs Windows 7 now.

But while the geek are busily inheriting their share of the digital world, most consumers and corporations will be choosing Windows 7 PCs as they're doing now, with the latest prognosticatory pronouncement on the topic coming from the world's most gifted guesstimating greats, Gartner.

Gartner says that by 2011's end, 42% of PCs will be loaded with Windows 7 and that 94% of new PCs, a total of nearly 365 million, will ship with Windows 7 this year.

Its forecast also points to Mac OS growing to a 4.5% share of all PCs in 2011, with a prediction that it will grow to 5.2% by 2015 - still far short of Microsoft whose Windows OS continues dominating despite the tablet frenzy that has tens of millions of sales rather than the PC world's hundreds of millions of sales.

Gartner's research director, Annette Jump, naturally jumped in with a quote, stating: 'Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the US and Asia Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from 4Q10.

'However, the economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions,' Ms Jump explained.

Gartner also predicts a greater role for virtualisation in the future, stating that '
Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that gets deployed to everybody through big corporate-wide migration', with the future seeing many organisations also using 'alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualisation and cloud computing in the next five years.'

Ms Jump then leaped in with a statement showing that Windows 7 is making ever bigger waves in the world of enterprise acceptance, noting that: 'By the end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7'.

Macs, Linux, Android, Chrome OS and more on page two, please read on!