Topic: Gartner study: Win 7 will finish 2011. with 42% of market-share

[Samker]

Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system has certainly been a much bigger success than the previous version, Windows Vista. Now a new study from research firm Gartner claims that Windows 7 could be installed on a whopping 42 percent of all PCs worldwide by the end of 2011.: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1762614
It adds that 94 percent of all new PCs shipped this year will have Windows 7 running things inside.

Part of the reason for this high adoption rate of the operating system, according to Gartner, is that the US and countries in Asia and the Pacific have seen increases in the IT budget for enterprise customers. However the same study added that other parts of the world, including Western Europe and Japan, will have slower adoption rates for Windows 7. In Japan's case that's due to the economic slowdown because of March's massive earthquake that hit that country.

The study also comments on the expected install rate of other PC operating systems. The Mac OS is expected to be running on 4.5 percent of all PCs by the end of the year, which is expected to increase to 5.2 percent by 2015. The Linux OS is still expected to be in a very small amount of PCs "because of the remaining high costs of application migration from Windows to Linux." As far as Google's Chrome OS and Android OS and HP's WebOS, Gartner does not expect any of them to "get any significant market share on PCs in the next few years."

(NW)