Last year at this time, Microsoft was in the final
stages of preparing Windows 7 for its worldwide launch. The new OS was
finally available to the public—well, at least that segment of the
public with a TechNet or MSDN subscription. Those early adopters had to
wait a few weeks after the official release
to manufacturing date but still got a head start on the
general public.
Those demanding and skeptical Windows users have now had
a full year to stress-test Windows 7 and decide whether it’s good
enough to replace Windows XP.
The verdict? Windows 7 has been a quiet success, maybe
even a phenomenon. Last spring, a Microsoft executive told me that the
company had sold 100 million Windows 7 licenses. As part of its quarterly
earnings call in July, Microsoft announced that that number
had risen to 175 million, and the company has projected that a total of
350 million Windows 7 licenses will have been sold by the end of this
year. That’s a run rate of roughly 30 million copies per month
worldwide, and it represents a lot of Windows
7-powered PCs.
Despite the big numbers, Microsoft has been almost
eerily silent about its success. I didn’t hear a lot of bragging in
advance of the Windows 7 launch, nor has there been much chest-thumping
since.
The competition has been muted as well. When was the
last time you saw one of Apple’s infamous “Get a Mac” ads? Hint: the
last three ads in Apple’s campaign were released on October 23, 2009,
the day after Windows 7 was launched to the public. With titles like Broken
Promises and PC News, Apple’s
marketing executives were hoping for a Vista-style wave of complaints,
but they were as disappointed as Windows 7 upgraders were relieved. And
then John Hodgman and Justin Long went off to spend more time with
their families.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 keeps selling and XP usage is
dropping. That’s certainly true at this site, where Windows 7 visitors
now outnumber those using Windows XP and Vista usage has plunged in the
past year. Here’s a graphic representation of how Windows 7 usage has
increased among visitors to this site since its first beta release back
in January 2009.
Data source: Google Analytics data for all
pages at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report. Samples cover 30-day periods
ending in December 2008, August 2009, December 2009, and August 2010.
Each sample consists of a minimum of 100,000 unique visitors.
Vista users were clearly eager to upgrade,
judging by these results, even to a beta release of Windows 7. But XP
users are also converting at a steady clip, with XP diehards now under
the 40% level here. These numbers include only Windows users, but I
also found interesting results when I looked at the percentage of
visitors using Mac OS X. As of this month, that number has returned to
its December 2008 levels (slightly over 5%) after peaking above 8% a
year ago this month, just before the launch of Windows 7.
So what’s really going on? You can summarize the entire
story in one simple sentence: Windows 7 is the
anti-Vista. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.
Every couple of months, some blogger or reporter tries to stir up a
Windows 7-related controversy (remember the “Black
Screen of Death” scare
stories?), but nothing seems to stick. Most of the obvious
annoyances of Vista are fixed—especially the misunderstood User Account
Control feature—and there hasn’t been a scandalous security or privacy
issue or a killer bug. Word of mouth has been solid, too.
In fact, it’s good enough to finally dislodge XP’s
stranglehold on corporate computing. Not overnight, but certainly by
XP’s end-of-life
date in April 2014.
That’s the conclusion I draw from a review of data
covering Windows 7 adoption rates in corporations, which are
notoriously conservative when it comes to OS upgrades. Although the
rates of adoption are far slower than among consumers, there’s evidence
to suggest that corporations are migrating to Windows 7 at a much
faster pace than for either XP or Vista. According to a Forrester
Research study, Windows 7 was “already powering approximately 7.4% of
corporate PCs” six months after its release. Although that number might
sound small, it represents about a 1.25% increase in Windows 7 usage
per month—an impressive number considering how slowly most corporations
move. It’s also more than twice the adoption rate of Windows Vista at
the same point in its release cycle (Vista usage in enterprises topped
off at 12.6% after three years), and it’s 50% greater than Windows XP
after a similar period.
As Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray explained:
[M]ost mainstream enterprises typically don’t embrace
a new desktop OS until 12 to 18 months after its release […] We likely
won’t see mainstream enterprisewide adoption of Windows 7 until the
middle of this year as IT managers continue developing their upgrade
strategies, testing and remediating their application portfolios, and
determining what role, if any, client virtualization will play in their
next-generation computing strategies.
Today, roughly 70-75% of corporate desktops are still
running Windows XP. If enterprise adoption rates for Windows 7 continue
at the seemingly slow pace of 1.5% per month, Windows 7 will probably
overtake XP in corporate installations by the end of 2011. If that rate
picks up even slightly, as it appears to be doing, then there’s a good
chance that XP will hold a single-digit share of corporate desktops
when it’s officially retired in 2014.
Last year around this time, I looked at some bullish projections
of Windows 7 adoption rates. One was from IDC
analyst Al Gillen, who predicted that Windows 7 would account
for 75% of units shipped in 2011 and nearly 90% of all Windows desktops
sold in 2012. This week, I asked Gillen whether his outlook for Windows
7 was still optimistic, based on the last year’s data. There’s “no
change” in that level of optimism, he told me. “We are still expecting
Windows 7 to be very successful.”
You can take that to the bank.
Copyright © 2010 CBS Interactive.
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