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Meanwhile, Net Applications places Windows 7 market share at 27.92 percent, Windows Vista at 9.27 percent and Mac OS X 10.6 at 3.76 percent.
Those stats are somewhat mirrored by StatCounter data, giving Windows XP some 44.4 percent of the market, followed by Windows 7 with 35.94 percent, Windows Vista with 11.02 percent and Mac OS X with 6.31 percent.
Microsoft wants businesses and consumers to give up XP in the worst way. Microsoft Download Center even offers a Windows XP End Of Support Countdown Gadget, which ticks off the days until the operating system's official support ends in 2014. The company's latest browser, Internet Explorer 9, won't run on XP.
But after a decade in the wild, the operating system is stable andpatched, with an interface and applications familiar to virtually anyonewho works with computers on a daily basis. Moreover, a relativelyanemic economy means less cash for businesses and consumers to spend onhardware and software upgrades, meaning more aging desktops and laptopsrunning XP.
What's perhaps more troublesome to Microsoft than a couple million XP holdouts, though, is a newfound softness in Windows revenue. For its recently ended fourth fiscal quarter, Microsoft reported a 1 percent year-over-year decline in revenue for its Windows and Windows Live Division.
During a July 21 earnings call, executives attributed this dip to softening PC sales, but given Windows' place as a revenue driver, any decline is possibly disconcerting. Microsoft depends on traditional desktop software to yield the substantial revenue it needs until newer initiatives, including cloud offerings such as Office 365, begin enjoying significant sales.
Windows 7 has sold some 400 million licenses since its October 2009 release. Microsoft has similarly high hopes for the next version of its popular operating system, internally code-named "Windows 8." In place of the desktop and taskbar that defined so many previous Windows releases, this newest version will rely on color tiles designed to be equally tablet- and PC-friendly.
Indeed, the release of Windows 8 will give Microsoft the opportunity for a more substantive play in the tablet market, currently the playground of Apple's iPad and the growing family of Google Android tablets. Tablets running Windows occupy some 4.6 percent of that touch-screen market, according to new data from research firm Strategy Analytics.
The componentized, embedded-specific version of Windows 7 is known as Windows Embedded Standard 7. Meanwhile, Microsoft has other x86 operating systems based on Windows XP, including Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows XP Embedded. We haven't seen data on relative market shares for these offerings.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a writer for eWEEK.
