Vista - the Second Most Used OS Worldwide Ahead of Tiger and Linux

Windows Vista is after just six months of availability, the second most used operating system worldwide, runner up to Windows XP, and ahead of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger and the various distributions of the open source platform Linux, according to statistics delivered by web analytics company OneStat. Released to businesses in November 2006, and to the general public in January 2007, Vista is advancing towards the dominant position on the operating system market, slowly eroding XP's share. Microsoft did applaud its latest operating system's performance in terms of sales, growing from 20 million sold licenses in the first month following the consumer launch to over

60 million shipped copies in half a year.

With the latest statistics over the usage of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, OneStat comes to confirm Microsoft's position illustrated as back as May. In mid May to be more specific, at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2007 in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, revealed that Vista was meeting the company's expectations to become the standard version of the Windows operating system.

After the first 100 days on the market, Vista "had nearly 40 million copies sold, and so that's twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release that we've had," Gates stated at the time, adding that "if you think about that, that says that in our first five weeks we've matched the entire installed base of any other provider of similar software."

At the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007 on July 26, Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer seized the opportunity to downplay Apple's relevance using fresh Vista sales figures. Turner produced the 60 million copies of Windows Vista sold into the marketplace in the first half a year and added that "and you know by our math we eclipse the entire install base of Apple in the first five weeks that this product shipped."

OneStat statistics come now to support the claims of both Gates and Turner. Taking into consideration the data provided by the metrics company, Windows Vista currently accounts for a global usage share of 3.23%, more than enough to put it ahead of Mac OS X and Linux.

"Microsoft's Windows dominates the operating system market with a global usage share of 96.72 percent. In August 2006 the total global usage share of Microsoft's Windows was 96.97 percent. Microsoft's Windows Vista has a global usage of 3.23 percent. The leading operating system on the web is still Microsoft's Windows XP with a global usage share of 87.36 percent. The global usage share of Apple's Macintosh is 2.70 percent and the global usage share of Linux is 0.36 percent," OneStat revealed.