A new Gartner study has good news for Microsoft. Windows 7 is doing really well and more than 42 percent of PCs worldwide will run Win 7 by the end of 2011. Gartner reports that nearly 635 million new PCs are expected to ship with the OS by the end of the year.

The report suggests that after a slow start, corporations are finally migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. Gartner research director Annette Jump said many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7. Windows 7 will likely be the last version of Microsoft's iconic OS that gets deployed via massive, enterprise-wide migrations. The move toward virtual and cloud computing architectures in the next five years will change how upcoming versions of Windows are deployed, the study says.

The tame Apple Press (TAP) which is desperate to sell the Mac OS on behalf of Jobs' Mob will find little in the Gartner report which is positive. Big G said that the Mac OS shipped on 3.3 percent of new PCs worldwide in 2008. That figure climbed to 4 percent in 2010, and to 4.5 percent  this year--and it's projected to grown to 5.2 percent by 2015. In otherwords it has no market share and is not likely to grow that much.

Gartner is less optimistic about Linux, which it predicts will remain a niche OS over the next five years with a global share below 2 percent. Sadly in the consumer market, Linux will be a non-entity with less than 1 percent of the PC market. It looks like that hope that Linux would eventually make it onto the desktop were false.