Microsoft is by far the most popular operating system maker for computers with its Windows family. It may have been years now since XP was the newest version of Windows, but many people are still running XP on their computers.
Techspot reports that the numbers are in for the global market share for computer operating systems for July 2011. According to the numbers Windows is still the runaway leader in the OS market with 87.66% of the entire market. Mac OS X has the second spot with 5.59% of the OS market, Linux has 0.98%, and other OS's are at 5.77% of the market.
Within that 87.66% of the market that Windows holds, there are three different versions of the OS in common use including Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. For the first time ever the percentage of Windows XP users have fallen below 50% of the entire Windows market share. As of July, the share for XP was 49.94%. Windows Vista was 9.24% of the Windows market share, and Windows 7 had 27.87% of the share. Older versions of Windows were 0.61% of the market.
Windows 7 is growing very quickly, which is what Microsoft wanted after the lackluster adoption of Vista. The mediocre Vista adoption is the reason XP still held so much of the market. There are so many users of Windows XP that while mainstream support for the OS ended in 2009, Microsoft will continue to offer Extended Support through 2014.
About a year ago, there were still 74% of the business computers in use that were running Windows XP. Enterprise customers were the ones holding onto the XP machines during the poor economy and the new numbers don’t indicate what percentage of business machines are still running XP.
