Adoption of Windows 7 continues to grow, with the weeks-old operating system accounting for 4 percent of PCs accessing the Web over the past weekend, according to Net Applications.
By contrast, it took Windows Vista seven months to reach that level, the Web-monitoring firm said in a report.
"The early anticipation and high expectations for Windows 7 seem to have been warranted," Net Applications Executive Vice President Vince Vizzaccaro said in an e-mail.
One of the key questions, though, is whether Windows 7 will help Microsoft regain share from Apple, Vizzaccaro said. "Can Windows 7 stop the slow Windows decline, or even reverse it? I think we'll see that answer develop in the next few months," he said.
A week ago, Net Applications noted that Windows 7 use had topped 3 percent. The new operating system tends to do better on weekends, the time when consumer use accounts for more of the market and then share dips back somewhat as the work week starts.
Windows 7 went on sale October 22, though it was already topping 2 percent market share in Net Applications' daily tracking statistics even before its official debut.
Market researcher NPD said last week that boxed copy sales of Windows 7 were also outpacing those of Windows Vista in its initial days on the market.
Microsoft has also said it is seeing strong interest from businesses, although typically corporations take many months to test a new operating system before deploying it widely.
At TechEd Europe, Microsoft talked about enterprise adoption of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, highlighting some early customers of the two products.
"We remain just pleased and humbled by the very warm reception we're seeing," Windows Vice President Tami Reller said in a Webcast on Monday.
Microsoft appears to be getting relatively strong early adoption of Windows 7 in the 10 days since its official launch.
According to Net Applications, more than 3 percent of PCs accessing the Web in the past two days have been doing so using the new operating system. Usage of the operating system has been growing strong in recent days, though Windows 7 already accounted for 2 percent of global Web traffic in the days ahead of its formal launch.
"The early adoption of Windows 7 looks very strong, and I don't believe Vista enjoyed the same early success," said Vince Vizzaccaro, an executive vice president at Net Applications. "Plus, we've seen surges the past two weekend days, and Windows has historically seen much higher usage market share on weekdays than on weekends."
However, weekends tend to see stronger usage by consumers. And consumers are more likely to move quickly to a new version of Windows than businesses, which tend to do extensive testing before adopting a new operating system.
The news is not all positive for Microsoft, though. As a whole, the Mac OS continues to gain on Windows. As of October, Windows had 92.5 percent of the worldwide operating system market, but Mac OS reached 5.27 percent, up from 5.12 percent in September. (Past numbers from Net Applications showed the Mac OS with significantly higher market share, though the market research firm says it has changed its methodology to better reflect the relative traffic of the countries from which it is getting data.)
Apple's recent anti-Windows 7 advertising has touted that if users are going to upgrade their Windows XP machines and have to transfer their data anyway, they might as well move to a Mac. Vizzaccaro said the early numbers suggest that the Mac might indeed be benefiting from such a trend but said it is too early to know for sure.
"We'll know much more in the months ahead," he said.
About 69.5 percent of Internet searches in the U.S. took place through Google during 2008, with search traffic increasing 8 percent over 2007, according to research firm Hitwise.
At whose expense was this growth? No surprise: Yahoo and Microsoft. Second-place Yahoo had 19.2 percent of the search volume, a drop of 11 percent from its year-earlier volume, while Microsoft accounted for 5.9 percent of the volume, a drop of 32 percent for the year, Hitwise said. Ask.com increased volume 1 percent to a share of 3.8 percent.
But looking at the story month-to-month, Microsoft fared better. "MSN Search has increased five months in a row now," Hitwise said, rising to 5.6 percent of the market in December.
Hitwise wasn't the only analysis firm to release market share numbers. On Wednesday, Nielsen Online issued its own, with broad agreement.
According to Nielsen, Google had 62.9 percent share in December, compared with 16.8 percent for Yahoo, 9.8 percent for Microsoft, 4.1 for AOL (which actually uses Google's results), and 2.0 for Ask.com.
Nielsen said the total number of searches in December was 8.6 billion in the U.S., up 19.6 percent from the year earlier.
Google's search share encroached on rivals, rising 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November.
(Credit: ComScore)Correction at 5:50 a.m. Monday: This story had an incorrect total for U.S. searches in November. The total was 12.3 billion.
Google grabbed a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from ComScore show.
Google's share increased 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November, while Yahoo dropped 0.1 percentage points to 20.4 percent and Microsoft dropped 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent.
Further down the pecking order, Ask.com dropped 0.2 percentage points to 4.0 percent and AOL rose 0.1 percent to 3.8 percent, ComScore said.
The total searches performed dropped 3 percent to 12.3 billion, though, so even Google lost out in absolute terms even as it gained share. Each search holds the potential to show search ads, so the query total is financially significant.
Google extended its lead in U.S. search market share.
(Credit: Hitwise)Google's steadily increasing search share neared 70 percent in June in the United States, according to new figures released Tuesday by Hitwise.
Its share increased from 68.29 percent in May to 69.17 percent in June, the analyst firm said. Over the same period, Yahoo dropped from 19.95 percent to 19.62 percent and Microsoft dropped from 5.89 percent to 5.46 percent.
Fourth-place Ask.com has managed to eke out gains over the last year, though it slid from 4.23 percent to 4.17 percent from May to June.
Google crossed the 60 percent share threshold in July 2006, analyst Matt Tatham said, slid back the one month in August 2006, but has been north of 60 percent ever since September 2006.
Search share is important to the companies' business because it means there's a potentially larger inventory of search results against which advertisements can be sold.
The statistics are based on a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users, Hitwise said.
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