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Windows 7 set to top OS league table

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10th Aug 2011
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Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system (OS) is set to become the leading PC platform by the end of the year, according to research conducted by Gartner.

The firm says 42% of PCs in use by the end of 2011 will run the OS, which first launched in 2009 as a replacement for its much maligned predecessor, Vista.

Gartner’s PC OS forecast has also assumed Windows 7 will “likely” be the last version of the platform to be deployed through corporate-wide migration: “In the future, many organizations will also use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualization and cloud computing in the next five years,” the firm said.

The report also said many enterprises are currently in the process of deploying Windows 7 across their installed PC base, following migration planning over the past year to 18 months.

Microsoft is currently working on the next iteration of the Windows operating system – expected to be christened ‘Windows 8’ – which according to CEO Steve Ballmer, is scheduled to arrive in 2012.

As for Windows’ rivals in the operating system space, the Gartner report expected an increase in the number of PCs shipped with Mac OS over the previous year, rising from 4% to 2010, to 4.5% in 2011. The report’s author, Annette Jump, research director at Gartner, said the increased adoption of both Macs and Mac OS is due to, “Apple's ability to grow well above the market average in the last 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface (UI) point of view and ease of integration with other Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and the existing Apple ecosystem of applications and programs”.

Gartner also expects the use of the open source Linux operating system to continue as niche, with less than a 2% share of the market, attributing it to “the remaining high costs of application migration from Windows to Linux”.

By contrast, the forecast expects 94% of new PCs to ship with Windows 7.

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