If you are looking or ways to compare sales numbers between Vista and Windows 7, today’s market share data published by Net Applications should provided a clear clue. Windows 7 crossed the 10% marker in March, less than 6 months after launch. Vista required 28 months to achieve the same goal.

According to Net Applications, Windows 7 held a market share of 10.23% in March, up from 8.92% in February. Vista’s share fell from 16.51% to 16.01% and XP fell from 65.49% to 64.46% in the same time frame. You may notice that the combined loss posted by XP and Vista, 1.53 points, exceeds Windows 7’s gains of 1.31 points.  Add in the fact that Windows NT also had a bad month with a loss of 0.31 points down to a market share of 0.21% and it is clear wasn’t a particularly good month for Microsoft.

The overall market share of all Windows version dropped from 92.12% to 91.58%.

Apple saw its Mac OS X OS climb from 5.02% to 5.33% Linux’ share increased from 0.98% to 1.03%. the iPhone had a marginal gain of 0.01 points to a market share of 0.51%.

Windows 7’s 10% market share is in line with the expectation that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Windows 7 licenses so far. While the general shipment performance is behind expectations – Microsoft intended to sell about 177 million Windows 7 licenses by the end of 2009 – the new operating system sells considerably better than Vista. Microsoft never revealed when Vista hit 100 million unit sales, but it seems that the company needed at least one year to get to this point.

Now it seems that Windows 7 is selling about twice as fast as Windows Vista – and achieved 10% market shared 22 months earlier than its predecessor, according to Net Applications.

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