In less than one year, Windows 7 has surpassed Vista in global usage, however both still pale in comparison to the aged Windows XP.
Vista was released in 2007 to extremely harsh critical reviews. The operating system left many concerns of application compatibility, stringent hardware requirements, and who could forget about the UAC?.
Windows 7 was released in September 2009 to high critical review.
New NetApplications analytics show that Windows has 90.67 percent of the OS market, with XP the dominant leader at 61.87 percent. Windows 7 has now moved to 14.46 percent, just ahead of Vista at 14.34 percent.
In the United States, XP has 44.26 percent, ahead of Vista at 23.31 percent and Windows 7 catching up at 16.09 percent.
Overall Windows share fell from just over 92 percent last July, thanks to a small increase in Apple Mac sales and a large jump in mobile operating systems. Linux share fell to under 1 percent.
Result for: dominant leader
SanDisk has agreed in principle to purchase the wireless MP3 player company MusicGremlin for a currently undisclosed amount.
The latter company, which was launched in early 2003, built media players called ‘Gremlins’ that could download music from a subscription service directly, using Wi-Fi, thus eliminating the need for a PC at all. Users could then share their songs with other Gremlin users.
The technology is still somewhat rare despite the fact that Microsoft has tried to use it in their Zune line and SanDisk has even used it in their Sansa Connect players. SanDisk’s Sansa Senior VP Daniel Schreiber says the features brought by Gremlin will play a “key role” in future Sansa media players.
Schreiber added that MusicGremlin will be fully integrated in SanDisk and will no longer continue its own services. It appears that SanDisk was also somewhat forced to make this move as it tries to steal more market share from the dominant leader Apple. Its Sansa Connect players currently use Yahoo’s unlimited music subscription service but the service has since closed.
