Odds & Ends: W7 Market Share, Windows 8 Beta and More

Let’s start the new week with some newsworthy items from the world of Windows 7. Did you see the reports that Windows 7 has surpassed Windows XP in market share for the first time this month? According to StatCounter, Windows 7’s average daily share for the first 10 days of the month was 32.2 percent, compared to XP’s average of 30.7. This is just one measure from one metrics vendor, but it is a milestone nonetheless, and it seems to lend credence to Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 is its fastest selling operating system ever.

Even while Windows 7 is achieving new heights, the Internet is buzzing with speculation on its replacement, Windows 8. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places, predicts that Microsoft will probably show off its first public beta of Windows 8 in September at a Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC) September 13-16 in Anaheim. If so, it would a similar rollout process to Windows 7, which made its beta debut at a Professional Developers’ Conference in October 2008. According to the Chronicle report, Microsoft usually holds a big PDC only when a new platform is debuting. Speaking of betas, Microsoft today announced the public beta of Office 365.

Also today, Microsoft will begin rolling out Internet Explorer 9 to Windows 7 customers through Windows Update. “On April 18^th, a little over a month after the final release of IE9, we will be ready to start the rollout of IE9 to our Windows7 and Windows Vista customers,” said Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing in his Exploring IE blog last week. “Similar to our approach for IE8, we will use Windows Update to deliver IE9 to users. IE9 will not install automatically on machines. Users will have to agree to install IE9.” For business customers who required time to plan and test their deployments, Microsoft will make IE9 available on Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in June. “WSUS allows use of management tools that make it easy for IT professionals to deploy IE9 in their environments in an automated fashion and at their own pace,” Capriotti writes.

That’s our Windows 7 news for a Monday morning. Anyone out there have anything to add?