Gartner: Windows 7 on 94 percent of new PCs

by Steven Mostyn - Aug 10 2011, 07:48

Google may one day seek to shift the momentum of its mobile Android operating system onto home-based hardware—and it may well succeed—but, until then, PCs will remain the domain of Microsoft and Windows.

That’s according to research specialist Gartner, which has this week said Redmond-based Microsoft will continue to resist the challenge of market rivals via Windows 7, which will have been shipped in 94 percent of new PC systems by the close of 2011.

Further to that, Gartner’s latest study suggests Windows 7 will be running on 42 percent of PCs worldwide by the dawn of 2012, while it expects more than 630 million PCs powered by Windows 7 to have been shipped during 2011 alone.

“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,” outlined Annette Jump, a research director at Gartner, in a statement.

That platform shift means that business users running on ye olde Windows X—many of which were left disgruntled by Windows Vista—are finally being swayed by the critical acclaim garnered by the Windows 7 upgrade.

Apple’s computer operating system (OS X) currently holds a market share of around 4.5 percent, while open-source plaform Linux pulls in less than a single percent.

Sadly, the ongoing dominance of Windows 7 on home-based computing devices is not matched in the mobile market, where the likes of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS have managed to marginalize Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform.

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