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Someone get the party balloons and slap a big "7" on them, for Windows 7 has finally overtaken its younger brother, Windows XP, in desktop market share. For those keeping score at home or running an office betting pool, the milestone comes just under two years since the release of Windows 7, and a bit over one year since Windows 7 passed Windows Vista's desktop market share.
According to new statistics from Statcounter, Windows 7 now commands 31.71 percent of all U.S. desktops—that's based on the aggregated visitor statistics tracked across approximately three million websites during the month of April. Windows XP now takes up second place in the U.S. desktop market at 31.56 percent, with Vista trailing third at 19.07 percent. And for Apple fans only, OS X currently hovers at a desktop market share of around 14.87 percent.
Looking at the stats over the past year, Windows 7 has been eating away at the desktop share of Windows Vista and Windows XP in equal measure. The desktop share of Apple's OS X has risen slightly from April 2010's 13.24 percent, but its overall growth hasn't experience nearly the same rise of fall as its Microsoft-based brethren.
Windows XP commanded 42.51 percent of the U.S. desktop market in April 2010, and Windows Vista, 27.45 percent. Windows 7 saw half the market penetration of its present-day totals, eating up only 14.7 percent of all U.S. desktops in April of 2010.
As far as worldwide statistics go, however, Windows XP is still the operating system to beat. Although it has lost a bit of its base since the same time period last year, when the OS captured 58.56 percent of the worldwide market, Windows XP is still the most popular operating system on Earth with a total market penetration of 47.19 percent.
Windows 7's growth over the past year has been steady, but the OS still only captures 31.22 percent of the market as of April 2011's figures. Windows Vista is down to 13.24 percent, but still edging out Apple's OS X and its market share of 6.45 percent.
So how long until Windows 7 overtakes all other versions of its operating system to become top dog? Judging by its current trajectory, we can expect to see the swap-on-top to happen sometime within the next year—due to the cannibalization of Windows Vista and Windows XP by Windows 7.
Pingdom has crunched the numbers to find that Windows, in total, isn't much growing in overall market share—rather, you can think of Windows kind of like a hurricane, and the different versions of the operating system are recirculating eyewalls. That's good news for Microsoft upgrade-wise, but bad news for the company's ambitions to increase its overall Windows presence in the desktop space. Then again, since Windows captures more than 90 percent of the desktop market share to begin with, just how much higher can Microsoft realistically go?
