Windows 7 is doing well, which gives the number crunching crowd an opportunity to compare it with Mac OS X – if only for a moment. According to Internet metrics company Net Applications, Windows 7 last weekend powered (on average) 5.07% of PCs, while in that week Mac OS X (in all its iterations) powered around 5% of computers worldwide.

Since Windows’ overall market share is 92.64%, it’s obvious that this was bound to happen, and that Windows 7 will eventually go far beyond the 5% marker (even if the folks at Net Applications admit that the 5% figure is only a peak, and that they’re missing a couple of numbers). The real news here is that Windows 7 is outselling Vista in its first month of sales, growing at a 3.9% monthly average. Its growth comes mostly at the expense of Windows XP, but, to a much lesser extent, also Mac OS X, as Apple’s overall market share was 5.27% in October.

All signs are showing that Microsoft has a clear winner in its hands: market share is growing, Steve Ballmer is frolicking, and users are happy. It also shows how resilient the desktop OS market is: even if it takes you 6 years to create a crappy OS (Vista), the competition won’t run over you or even capture a significant market share (which happened in the web browser race, where Firefox capitalized on Microsoft’s IE-induced slumber).

Tags: mac os x, operating system, Windows 7

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Surprise: Windows 7 Passes Mac OS X in Market Share