Comment : The First 100 Days Of Windows 7

Windows 7 has been launched exactly 100 days ago on the 22nd of October 2009 and has quietly secured itself as the most successful version of Microsoft's Windows family ever.

Not only was it the biggest pre-order of all times on Amazon, besting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the UK website, it also managed to sold out massively worldwide and has attracted rave reviews from a number of publications globally.

Its appeal was so huge that it managed to eclipse sales of Windows Vista, the much-loafed predecessor of Windows 7, which is still the second most popular OS of all times, behind Windows XP within days of its release.

Since its launch 100 days ago, its market share has more than tripled going from 2.15 percent of the global pie to more than 6 percent according to Netapplications.

If this trend continues, Windows 7 will surpass Vista by the end of June 2010 and may reach 20 percent of the worldwide OS market in its first year. To put those figures in perspective, it is already more popular than all the versions of Mac OS X put together.

Another survey, carried out by Steam as part of its Hardware Survey, delves even deeper into the adoption of Windows 7 and shows some very important trends. Steam is representative of the gamers community, the cream of the cream, in other words, trend setters.

It shows that 64-bit technology has become mainstream with twice as many Windows 7 64-bit installations recorded compared to 32-bit. What was even more exciting was that the portion of Steam users installing 64-bit Windows 7 was growing at around 20 percent per month.