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Windows market share dives below 90 Percent for first time

Posted on: December 4, 2008 5:25 PM, by Greg Laden

Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the past two years, erasing gains made in two of the past three months and sending the operating system's share under 90% for the first time, an Internet measurement company reported today.
source

In the mean time, Linux grew from 0.71 to 0.83%, and Mac OS X grew by 0.66 percent to reach 8.9 percent.

That's a whopping big change for Linux, percentage-wise.

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Comments

I did that.

Posted by: JanieBelle | December 4, 2008 5:50 PM

I bought my current PC in 2003, in the era of peace known as XP well before Vista came out. I've read enough about Vista to know how awful it is, but all the same, I admittedly am more than a little perplexed by the ferocity of the OS wars.

The only Apples I ever knew were the computers that my elementary school had - which I hated. I grant that my family has always had PCs rather than Apples, and I'm sure that that has a lot to do with my preferences. Still, the whole Apple/Windows thing seems incredibly overblown to me.

Posted by: K. | December 4, 2008 6:07 PM

But it's so easy a rabbit could use it!

Posted by: James F | December 4, 2008 6:38 PM

Still, the whole Apple/Windows thing seems incredibly overblown to me.

I'm not sure from that it's as much an Apple/Windows thing, which you might equate with a Ford/Chevy thing, as it is free exchange/commercialzation thing.

Posted by: Joel | December 4, 2008 6:47 PM

Joel-

Touche.

Posted by: K. | December 4, 2008 6:52 PM

The popularity of the Asus Eee PC might be able to take a large share of the credit for this. It's selling so fast Asus is hard-pressed to keep up with the demand, and resellers seemingly can't keep them in stock. It certainly has allowed me to abandon Microsoft, for good I hope. I wish I'd had the incentive to use Linux long ago. I'm loving it.

Posted by: RSG | December 4, 2008 9:39 PM

I develop and maintain a major commercial web site in South Africa and continually monitor browser usage - to keep everything compatible. Very interesting is the noticeable and welcome swing away form Internet Explorer to Firefox in recent years.

Browser Usage - % of total visitors

INTERNET EXPLORER FIREFOX
Nov 2006 68 25
Nov 2007 62 31
Nov 2008 48 34

Windows is a grudge purchase as we just have too much investment in software to consider and O/S change. Every time Microsoft stabilises a windows version a new one is unleashed upon us and we can no longer acquire the older version. At least Microsoft is rapidly losing the browser war.

Posted by: Les Wood | December 4, 2008 10:38 PM

Browser Usage - % of total visitors

INTERNET EXPLORER FIREFOX
Nov 2006 68 25
Nov 2007 62 31
Nov 2008 48 34

Posted by: Les Wood | December 4, 2008 10:45 PM

Hey, does Les' comment count as one or two?

Posted by: JanieBelle | December 4, 2008 10:49 PM

The Inquirer calls it slightly differently:

While Apple has apparently added more converts in the last year, growing its user base by somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent, Linux has evidently grown faster, since it started 2008 with a much smaller user base. Depending upon whether one believes Linux started 2008 with 0.5 per cent or 1.0 per cent market share, its user base has grown by either 200 per cent or 50 per cent. Either way, those are explosive rates of growth in Linux adoption.

I'm sure many of us know non-techie people who have bought eee netbooks, or similar: this seems feasible.

Also:

Microsoft's getting squeezed at the high end of the PC market by elegant Apple computers running OSX and at the lower end by less expensive desktops and netbooks running Linux.

Oh dear.

Posted by: Barry | December 5, 2008 4:22 AM