Despite all cynical and unenthusiastic speculations of Windows 7’s failure to compete with XP, and its being another Black Screen issue, a full year of probation has cleared all doubts. Windows 7 is a hit, and XP is expected to retire this coming 2014.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott provides some interesting figures about Windows 7. It was released August of last year with only a very small segment who dared to participate in its try-out period. Users normally wouldn’t take the risk, let alone big corporations, but those who did in fact take the risk determined it was worth it. With many positive reviews and comments from the media and users themselves every month, Microsoft has sold 100 million copies last Spring, and it rose to 175 million this July. Microsoft is expecting a sale of 30 million copies per month, with a total of 350 million by the end of the year.

XP and Vista users are now outnumbered by Windows 7. Those using Vista were ready to take the upgrade in the first place. At the moment, XP users went down to 40% of all the Windows users. The release of Windows 7 also seem to have affected the performance of Mac OS X as it dropped from 8% back to it’s rate as of December 2008 of 5% tops.

Six months after its release, Windows 7 has already powered 7.4% of corporate computers. It has an average increase of 1.25% every month. Another positive sign is that huge corporations who are always unwilling to take the risk of changing their corporate OS are shifting to Windows 7 a lot faster than it did during XP and Vista’s transfer periods, in fact, twice as fast compared to Vista’s.

If the adoption rate of Windows 7 continues at a stable rate 1.5% per month, it will overtake Windows XP in 2014. To make the long story short, XP’s reign is over.  On the mobile front, Windows 7 has high expectations as well, with even more goodies awaiting Windows 8.