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Notwithstanding the probable economic slowdown in developed countries, market analyst and research firm Gartner sees improvement in IT budgets to push use of Windows 7 operating system (OS) on 42 per cent of worldwide installed computer base by end of 2011.
“Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the US, Asia and Asia Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from last quarter of 2010,” Ms Annette Jump, research director at Gartner said in a statement.
Gartner’s latest PC OS forecast shows 94 per cent of new PCs will be shipped with Windows 7 in 2011. Operating system is the interface that enables use of various softwares and application in computing devices.
Jump sees impact of economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 likely to lead to slow deployment of Windows 7 across those regions.
The forecast of the firm assumes that Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that gets deployed through big corporate-wide migration.
“In the future, many organisations will also use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualisation and cloud computing in the next five years,” the statement said.
“By end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and now moving rapidly to Windows 7,” she said.
The statement added that shipments of Apple iMacs and Mac OS share with new PCs have seen increases in the last 12 months. Mac OS was installed on 4 per cent of new PCs shipped worldwide in 2010 versus 3.3 percent in 2008.
Mac OS is forecast to be on 4.5 percent of PCs in 2011, and grow to 5.2 percent of new PCs in 2015, the report said.
Gartner report sees share of open source software Linux OS at below 2 per cent during the next five years because of high costs of application migration from Windows to Linux.
Gartner, in the statement, said it does not expect Google’s Chrome OS, Android or web OS to get significant market share on PCs in the next few years.
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