Gartner: Windows 7 taking over PCs

Analyst's latest research reveals that the operating system will be in 42 per cent of PCs by the end of the year

Windows 7 is set to be installed in 42 per cent of PCs by the end of 2011, according to research by Gartner.

The analyst’s latest PC OS forecast also revealed that 94 per cent of new PCs will be shipped with Windows 7 in 2011 – equating to nearly 635 million PCs.

Annette Jump, research director at Gartner, said: “Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the US and Asia-Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from the fourth quarter of 2010.

“However, the economic uncertainties in western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and African countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March, will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions.”

Gartner added that Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that is deployed through big corporate migration. In the future, the analyst claimed, many organisations will use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move towards virtualisation and cloud computing over the next five years.

"Many organisations have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the past 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7," Jump added.

Shipments of Apple iMacs and Mac OS on new PCs have also seen increases in the past year, Gartner said.

The Mac OS was shipped on four per cent of new PCs worldwide in 2010, compared with 3.3 per cent in 2008. Gartner forecasts that Mac OS will be on 4.5 per cent of PCs in 2011, and will grow to 5.2 per cent in 2015.

Jump said: “The adoption of Mac PCs and Mac OS is a result of Apple's ability to grow well above the market average in the past 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface 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.”

Linux OS is expected to remain niche over the next five years, with its share below two per cent because of the remaining high costs of application migration from Windows to Linux.

In the consumer market, Linux will be run on less than one per cent of PCs, as Linux's success with mini-notebooks was short-lived and few mini-notebooks are preloaded with it today.

Gartner added that it does not expect Chrome OS, Android or webOS to get “any significant market share” on PCs in the next few years.

By 2012, Gartner said the market will reach the point of crossover between Windows-specific and OS-agnostic applications for organisations as 50 per cent of applications will be OS-agnostic.