Windows 7's share jumps 40% in first week of release

Windows 7's market share surged nearly 40% in the week following its release, according to Web measurement company Net Applications. Overall, Windows continued to lose share globally, dropping 0.23 of a percentage point during October, while Apple's Mac OS X picked up most of that loss, gaining 0.15 of a point to finish the month near 5.3%, its highest ever.

For the week after Microsoft launched Windows 7 on Oct. 22, the new operating system's share averaged 2.66%, a jump of more than 39% over the 1.91% average for the part of October prior to its retail release.

Windows 7's peak of 3.48% on Saturday, Oct. 31, represented an even larger 82% increase over the average of Oct. 1 through Oct. 22. For the month, Windows 7 finished with a market share of 2.15%, up 41% over the 1.52% for September. The numbers from Net Applications mean that about one in every 44 personal computers was running Windows 7 last month.