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Just FYi, the site linked to in the article only shows Worldwide stats on it's free overview page. So that 7.42% is a worldwide statistic. Which considering the costs associated with a Mac is pretty impressive.

You have to pay for a subscription to that site to see their US and other breakdown stats.

Indeed, well spotted - the answer is to be found by looking at their original source that they link ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 ). Guess what? Whilst all the other browsers are reported correctly, Safari is not 10.91%, but 7.42%. With this figure, the total comes to less than 100% (the remainder presumably taken up by the other browsers). So they've inflated Apple's share by 3.49%, or in terms of proportion, it's almost 1.5 times the true value!

(Are we going to hear an article that this is now part of a pro-Apple agenda? I think blatantly lying about usage statistics is far worse than saying people don't use Iphones in Japan, after all...)

I don't know if it's intentional, or incompetence, but together with the "4 times 0.5 equals 1 percent" blooper, I think we can safely put this article in the trash.

I wrote a long post which appears to have been eaten. In summary:

Even allowing for rounding, the growth per day must be less than 0.26125%. Their other statistics are quoted accurately, indeed, to not just 1, but 2 decimal places. There is no way it is reasonable to represent the growth as "almost 0.5%" per day.

I'm not sure how we can trust an article that doesn't get basic maths right.

Secondly, their article is a blatant lie - the original source http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 lists Safari as 7.42% (the other browsers are all reported accurately).

From TFA:

Overall market share among the top five dominant browsers remained largely stable through February, according to Net Applications.
.
.
But the main change came with Apple's Safari, after the version 4 beta of the browser was released last week.
The beta release helped push Apple's browser market share to 10.91 per cent, or 1.88 per cent more than the same time in the week before its release. Last month, it was 9.04 per cent.

Uhh... No.

Last month, according to above mentioned Net Applications, Safari's share was 7.42%.

Same numbers you will get if you click the link in TFA to see that 10.91% market share.
Cause you CAN'T SEE THE WEEKLY REPORT UNLESS YOU PAY.

But, if the above claimed 9.04% is any indication at the accuracy of TFA (compared to the actual 7.42%) - then Safari probably jumped about 0.26%.
Or less... or more... who knows. Maybe there were only 5 copies downloaded?

I mean... if you pad your stats by 22% (21.83% - the difference between 7.42% an 9.04%) - who knows what the real numbers are then?

I'm having a hard time understanding where the "10%" figure comes from too. The article links to a stats page which lists the stats for IE, Chrome and Firefox at 68.17, 1.16, 21.96 respectively (as reported in TFA).

But, for Safari, the article says 10.91%, but the stats page says 7.42% -- that's a big difference!

Can anybody find where this 10% figure comes from (my personal guess is outta thin air)

...the KDE folks would "dump" KHTML for Webkit. I just mean "default to Webkit in Konqueror." Such a move would raise Konqueror's profile which cannot be a bad thing.

Right now, Konqueror is a non issue when it comes to browser statistics on the internet. In some statistics, it is lumped like other browsers into the "other" category like here . And over here , Konqueror is missing all together! Sad indeed.

While I say this, I know egos are high in the Open Source world, so what I am suggesting has little chance of being adopted.

Now, before I get modded a troll, I would like to know whether what I am suggesting is a very bad thing.

While I realize they're hemorrhaging market share (how sad)

"Hemorrhaging" is GM sales.

It is not Microsoft which has lost 2% of the desktop market - 23% of which now Vista. Operating system market share

An interesting footnote here:

In the Net Applications webstats, Linux at 0.8% has only eight times the share of the Win 7 Beta

- and something less than twice the share of the iPhone.

Yes, Hitslink numbers are very US-centric, as you can tell by what ISPs their traffic is coming from: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=18

Though, W3Counter uses a really funky methodology to come up with its results.

An operating system's installed base is not the same as the market share.

Net Applications colllects mass market web stats.

It collects stats on users and systems - the PC, the cell phone, the video game console --- quite literally any device that can link to sites like Amazon, Google and the BBC.

We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals. The websites in our population represent dozens of countries in regions including North America, South America, Western Europe, Australia / Pacific Rim and Parts of Asia. About Our Market Share Statistics

A general-purpose consumer model, Tier 1 OEM computer, no less. FFS, what does it take to make someone happy these days?

For my part, that they showed up more in actual usage data like NetApplication's trends. Everybody agrees Macs are on the rise and that's reflected. Supposedly there's a big bunch of Linux netbooks being sold, but where are they? In the last year Macs have increased by 2.5% while Linux has increased 0.2%. I mean if we got 33% marketshare on a tier 1 OEM computer model something just doesn't add up. Yes, their data might be biased but not moreso that a real increase in linux use should show up in the statistics even though the absolute number was off. Despite all the possibilities for blocking and faking and whatnot, I doubt that all those people buying Dells now are geekier and better at hiding than the ones that show up already. At least some fraction should show up.

Also, I'm more interested in how it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Comparing it to IE7 is a little bit like Ford comparing their new car to a horse and cart. No offense meant to the browser, but from every chart I've seen it's the bottom of the barrel in terms of speed.

Actually "the bottom" of the barrel is IE 6, which still has about 30% marketshare on the websites I work on.

But the real reason they're talking about IE 7 is simple: it's their only real competitor.

Firefox's real strength is being customisable, which aims it squarely at a different target market to Safari. Chrome is using the same rendering engine as Safari, so any new marketshare to either one benefits both browsers and there's tons of markethsare available right now, and opera is too insignificant to even consider (Safari already has hardly any users and even it has 12x more than Opera according to wikipedia's reference: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0)

It's rather a pity Slashdot's jokes and memes do not come with an expiration date.

It would make for clearer thinking:

Oh, the humanity: Windows 7's draconian DRM?

You know you've reached rock bottom when every Microsoft-bashing story from kdawson is met with gales of laughter across the Internet.

Vista is close to taking 25% of the client OS market: Top Operating System Share Trend

Linux has yet to scratch its way into the single digit.

OEM Vista is the 64 Bit OS that runs on the dual or quad core PC with four to eight gigabytes of RAM that you can buy at any WalMart.

The same WalMart which unloaded its Linux inventory in favor of XP on the netbook.

99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?

Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.

Not really. 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit browsers. Flash comes in both 32 and 64 bit forms for Linux.

If you look here

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

Windows 88.26%
Mac 9.93%
Linux 0.83%

Add them up and you get just over 99%

Anyhow it is open swfdec and Gnash exist. And Adobe offers Flashlite for embedded platforms.

According to the latest "Market Share" survey Windows, Mac and Linux users combined represent more than 99% of the web users. Flash is available on all those platforms and more.

But considering that on some platform, users may be dumb enough not to be able to install Flash, that some users may not want to install Flash for its close-sourceness this number could very well just above 98%. I mean that's a shame Adobe are lying with those numbers and should apologize to everyone for making up numbers so easily.

You are right on the money to have discover such an evil plot.

Here's the source that computerworld uses:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9

If you want a dozen articles on the subject:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=Windows+market+share+2008

Those are stats from a site for web developers, they're hardly representative of the population as a whole.

Then look at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpmr=100&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=Q&qpsp=40. Still growing quickly.

how hard can it be to write a client with native Linux support?

Very hard.

Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.

If you can even get the thing to install and launch, sound definitely won't work.

The reason people have a hard time developing complicated commercial software on Linux is that said software is distributed in binary form, and Linux is *not* built for binary distribution.

Libraries break their ABI periodically on Linux because no one really thinks about binary developers. Think about this: a deb package for Ubuntu from a release six months ago will probably not work on the next release.

Aside from that, sound is an enormous clusterfuck on Linux. Sound is kind of important for games.

Considering all these problems, the return on investment is very low. There are very few Desktop Linux users. The mac has about 10% desktop marketshare now, but Linux is under 1%

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

and most Linux users, including myself, just dual boot to play games. So why should a game company pay a bunch of developers full time for a year to port the game? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars they will *never* make back on a market like that.

Linux - all flavors - has 0.8% of the "desktop."

The Win 7 Beta has 0.1%. The iPhone 0.5%

OSX 10.5 5%. Vista 23%.

These are good numbers for mass market operating systems that demand a significant investment in hardware. Operating System Market Share [Feb 7, 09].

Net Applications collects webstats.

Its clients are interested only in a head count. Hits to their sites. Not in licenses, not in product still in shipping containers on the L.A. docks.

Vista's share is currently growing at the rate of about 1% a month. Linux is still struggling to break into the single digit.

I get less than 1%, and with a growth rate of only around 40% over the last two years there's really nothing to be afraid of?

5 million people used Frontpage in 2001

IE 6 still has 20% marketshare

Numbers mean nothing.

Undoing some mods for this....

WWWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHH!

The simple truth of the matter is that Linux has roughly the market share that is shown on these websites. Sure, it will be different for every website. Sure, there will be users who change their user-agent strings. That's what averages are for.

Assuming:
Windows: 88%
Mac: 10%
Linux: 2%

Suppose 80% of Linux users are masquerading around as windows users 100% of the time. Look at the percentages now:
Windows: 80%
Mac: 10%
Linux: 10%

If user-agent switching was the sole cause of the discrepancy, a simple survey of Linux users could determine a "true" result. However, unless that result is much greater than 50%, it means Linux still has next to no market share.

Source:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=120&qpmr=100&qpdt=1&qpct=0&qpcustomc=

At year's end, Vista, had 21% of the desktop, the MacIntel 7% and Linux 0.85%. Operating System Market Share.

In Top Operating System Share Trends, Linux is now lumped in with "Others."

At year's end, Vista, had 21% of the desktop, the MacIntel 7% and Linux 0.85%. Operating System Market Share.

In Top Operating System Share Trends, Linux is now lumped in with "Others."

You mean like the mass migration from Windows 98/ME/2K to Windows XP? I know everyone seems to enjoy running around and laughing that Vista is a massive failure and that nobody is using it, but the reality is that Vista is far from a failure where the numbers are concerned. Vista's adoption curve has been quite healthy, in fact moreso than that of Windows XP by a margin of about 25%. If Windows 7 were not to be released then after 5 years I would definitely expect that Windows Vista would break the 85% adoption than Windows XP held at the time that Windows Vista was released. Windows 7 and a proper tighter release cycle will short circuit that.

Windows Vista currently enjoys 21% market share, which puts it at twice what all versions of MacOS can muster and almost 25 times the market share of Linux. What a massive failure.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10

And these numbers are based on desktop usage and site statistics, not sales, so they're not artificially inflated by people who immediately downgrade.

Right now, according to MarketShare, IE6 and Firefox 2/3 are roughly tied for market share (about 20% to each). TheCounter says that IE6 has 34% of the market while Firefox has 17%, and even W3Schools says that IE6 still has about 20% of users.

The moral of this story is: lots of people don't upgrade. They don't even run Windows Update. They use the browser they got when they installed XP, and they probably don't even know anything else is out there.

This is why, whenever Microsoft ties an application to the operating system, the market suffers. It becomes really hard to compete in that space. Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. This is the way it's been for more than a decade now. The antitrust action against Microsoft was nothing more than a slap on the wrist; it did nothing to restore competition.

If Microsoft is so interested in bundling high-quality apps with the operating system for the good of its users, then why haven't they bundled Microsoft Word?

like I said in the last thread, Is IE that big of an issue when it's losing market share to competitors? IE8 isn't going to save it because it still has abymissial JScript performance and as more sites everyday are using AJAX, IE gets slower and appears to lock up more.

Over the last 2 years, it lost market share, and According to these guys IE dropped from 79.9 down to 68.1. Now Google chrome is in the mix and already eclipsed Opera's share of .7% within 4 months and stands at 1% market share, and it only going up from there.

This isn't 2000, When all you had was a reliable and fast IE, a buggy Mozilla, a decripid and virtually useless Netscape, and a "HTML compliant" Opera that can't render any site correctly. Now, there's a slow and locking up IE, a reliable and fast rendering Firefox, a solid preforming Safari, a super fast and easy to install Chrome and a better, but still renders funny sometimes Opera.

FIrst off, FireFox should have never wasted resources on the Ad's or any of the other gimmicks. Word of mouth has done more for FF than anything they have tried involving Advertisements.

Second, people won't switch browsers if they don't think there's a reason. Period. As of late, However, IE has had horrendous performance. With Chrome pushing onto the scene through Google and FireFox spreading due to word of mouth, unless MS does something bold to IE and fast, and IE8 is nowhere near bold enough, there going to bleed market share like a sive.

IE lost 5% last year. it doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that it barely lost anything the 5 previous years. Also, the downward trend is getting steeper. currently IE stands at 68.15 according to these guys. It's been roughly losing 1% every month to FireFox, Chrome and Safari. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and at this rate, they'll be below 60% by the end of this year.

I was talking of their OS share, not browser share. Sorry for not making that clear.
But this has been decreasing lately as well, though not as dramatically as the browser. Hopefully these are both trends that will continue. Regardless I don't think the current proposal makes sense, there are better ways of regulating MS.

Also, if you look at the trend in Microsoft Windows "market share" estimated by people like Net Applications, you can see that the decline of Windows started long before the housing bubble deflated. They were still being rated at 96% of the market in 2004 and 2005 and have been in what looks like continuous decline ever since. Granted, it's not much of a decline yet, only 7% or so according to Net Applications, but it does serve as evidence that Microsoft's troubles did not start with the economic crisis, the economic crisis may have compounded their existing troubles though.

The current favored method is tracking web users across large collections of websites through cookies and the browser's User Agent.

But since cookies can be blocked and User Agent Strings can be munged, "favored" != "accurate".

Linux has <1% marketshare and declining

Not arguing about the <1% part, but the "declining" part is questionable given the obviously small sample base. If you throw out the two high and low numbers then the trend is slowly upward. I suspect the high 0.9x numbers in August and September were just statistical noise.

Of course, this metric is skewed somewhat by the fact that Firefox users can fake their user agent

Ya think?

And not just Firefox, KDE's browser has the same ability, I'm guessing just about any browser running on Linux has to allow this because of broken (IE+Windows only) websites.

Precisely why relying on the User Agent ID is so unreliable, its just a text string that can be user-modified like anything else in a browser's configuration.

I would say its not hard to believe that market use of Linux/BSD on the desktop rival this at least.

I would.

Honestly I am not sure how people are counting number of Linux/BSD desktop/laptop users since there is no license to buy.

The current favored method is tracking web users across large collections of websites through cookies and the browser's User Agent.

Linux has <1% marketshare and declining (enable javascript for hitslink if you use NoScript)
Of course, this metric is skewed somewhat by the fact that Firefox users can fake their user agent (for sites like fafsa.ed.gov, for instance)

...then go using one copy of a download to install numerous times/instances.

Is that so very different from your average XP install?

According to the Apple site, a copy of Leopard costs $129.

To be pedantic, that is supposed to be an upgrade disc.

Vista ended the year with 21% of the desktop, up 8% in from February.

The MacIntel with 7%, up 3% and Linux (all flavors) 0.8%, up 0.2% since February. Top Operating System Share Trend

Are the masses just as tired of dancing the Redmond Slide like most of us /. type folks are?

No one is stampeding to buy anything right now.

But those who are in the market are most buying Vista. The perception remains that OEM Linux is a bottom-feeder and the Mac the "high priced spread."

FOSS would be dancing naked in the streets. LOL 2008 WinXP W2000 Win98 Vista W2003 Linux Mac December 71.4% 1.7% 0.1% 15.6% 1.7% 3.8% 5.3% http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp Windows 88.68% Mac 9.63% Linux 0.85% iPhone 0.44% Playstation 0.04% SunOS 0.01% Nintendo Wii 0.01% FreeBSD 0.01% NetBSD 0.00% AIX 0.00% HP-UX 0.00% OpenVMS 0.00% SCP 0.00% SCO 0.00% OpenBSD 0.00% http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

The article explores features new to the beta.

It is not - and does not pretend to be - a review of Win 7 as a whole.

MS Vista ended the year with 21% of the global desktop. The OSX MacIntel with 7%. Linux with 0.8% Top Operating System Share Trend

We are not talking licenses here, we are talking users surfing the web - and a site that tracks access through the Wii as diligently as it does OSX and Windows.

The trend line for Linux couldn't be flatter if you drew it with a T-square.

Apple and Microsoft are pretty much where you would expect to find them anywhere in the last 25 years or so.

But Apple has bet its future on pricey high tech gadgets.

Microsoft profits - indirectly - from the $150 720p HD pocket camcorder.

"Attention WalMart shoppers."

Fun tech.

Family tech.

But not a budget-buster.

That is a good place to be right now.

The XP netbook at $350. The 64 Bit Vista Premium laptop at $800.

Microsoft is solvent, profitable - with Exxon-Mobil rated corporate credit. "Solid as the Rock of Gibraltar." Not even Apple can claim that much.

Vista ended the year with 21% of the market and the MacIntel with 7%. Top Operating System Share Trend

This is the MS Vista Basic desktop at WalMart.com at $700:

Dell Inspiron 531s Sempron CPU, 19" widescreen monitor, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, HP Multifunction Printer-Scanner, MS Office Home and Student 2007 [Full Version]

Vista Premium at $800:

HP Pavilion Desktop 2 GHz Intel Dual-Core CPU, 22" screen, 3 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD.

64 Bit Vista Premium at $900 + options:

HP Pavilion Desktop AMD 2.2 GHz Phenom Quad Core CPU, 6 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, nForce chip set and NVIDIA 6150 DX 10 graphics

The point being that the headless Mac Mini remains a tough sell in the mass consumer market.

Your simplification numbers are too simple. You are cutting the Mac numbers basically in half: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=11 Win: XP: 65.22% Vista: 21.12% 2000: 1.47% ttl: 88% est Mac: Intel-Based: 7.19% Legacy: 2.44% ttl: 10% It seems to me that a 10% possible gain is well worth going after - Don't you wish YOUR income went up 10%? Note also that those who buy expensive (Over $1000) computers are currently more likely to buy a Mac than a PC: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9947501-37.html I'm thinking entering a market with more high-income users would be a good move for any company. That said, there are no guarantees, but it certainly a good market to look into.

win2k is just fine for most people

Keep telling yourself that, it won't make it any less laughable. Take a look at this and then this and then finally this. Nevermind the fact that most driver developers abandoned 2k long ago, if they ever bothered to support it at all. And I'm talking about average user stuff not back-end business that really should have been migrated by now to either some sort of *nix solution or a newer Windows. For average users, 2k does not compare to any of the newer Windows systems. But I digress.

The original point was that Internet Explorer 7 uses hooks that take advantage of their more modern OSes, and to expect legacy support forever is completely unreasonable. You have diverted this so far from trying to make it seem like this (No IE7 on 2k) was an artificial limitation to simply attacking Microsoft because they aren't as in love with their old OS as you are. Go cry about your upgrade treadmill where someone actually cares, it was my sore mistake to expect any sort of discussion instead of this circular crap that ignores Microsoft is a business that, like every other business that stays in business, cuts costs when it won't bother a significant portion of their market. To quote Jacobim Mugatu "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" You really expect them to care about less than 2%?

Win2k is a decade old. Stable or not, you can't expect companies to go on supporting it forever.

Why not? If there are enough users (especially large businesses) and people paying for support (i.e. licensed or bespoke software) then why cut off customers?

The latest Net Applications numbers show Windows 2000 has about 1.47% market share. Maybe this isn't enough users.

Of course, I expect a larger-than-1.47% share among business users. Home-oriented software/services (e.g. Photoshop/Premiere Elements, Netflix Watch Instantly, Foobar2000) are abandoning Windows 2000 users more quickly than business-oriented software, but many big names in business software have also started the Win2K abandonment (e.g. QuickBooks Pro, Photoshop CS4).

This bugs me a bit since most Windows XP (NT 5.1) software should work fine in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) with few, if any, modifications. However, Windows 2000 was never really meant for home users and 10 years of support from Microsoft is a pretty good run for an OS. I salute those Windows 2000 users who will skip both XP and Vista when Win2K's extended support ends in mid-2010 (Windows 7 will be out by then).

That's the funny thing about statistics. If you torture the numbers sufficiently, they will eventually confess. Let's begin with methodology. Please go to the hitlink.com homepage and scroll down to the section titled "About Our Market Share Statistics." As you read, ask yourself the question, "What indicates this methodology is unscientific?" I found several indicators, and I bet you will too.

Secondly, what makes hitslink.com the authoritative source for OS statistics? There is a decent wikipedia article that cites statistics from five other websites similar to hitslink.com. Their numbers range from 0.47% to 3.80% for Linux and 3.66% to 8.87% for Mac. That there is such a wide range of estimates of operating system usage (factor of almost eight for Linux, factor of more than two for Mac) should be a clue about how all of these numbers should be viewed.

Having said that, let us assume there is truth in the hitslink.com numbers you cite and take them at face value. Linux began the year at 0.65% and ended at 0.85%, which is a 30.77% increase. Mac began the year at 7.46% and ended at 9.63%, indicating a 29.09% increase.

Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.

Your statement is not quite true. Month to month increase for Mac was 8.04% for November and 8.47% for December. For Linux the increase was 16.9% and 2.41% respectively.

God, this article must be one of the crappiest in a long, long time. The december figures are already up!

Browser trends
MSIE 68.15%
Firefox 21.34%
Safari 7.93%
Chrome 1.04%
Opera 0.71%

Operating system trends
Windows 88.68%
Macs 9.63%
Linux 0.85%
iPhone 0.44%

The two line summary:
Firefox and Safari both take lots of market share from MSIE which is now way below 70%.
Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.

God, this article must be one of the crappiest in a long, long time. The december figures are already up!

Browser trends
MSIE 68.15%
Firefox 21.34%
Safari 7.93%
Chrome 1.04%
Opera 0.71%

Operating system trends
Windows 88.68%
Macs 9.63%
Linux 0.85%
iPhone 0.44%

The two line summary:
Firefox and Safari both take lots of market share from MSIE which is now way below 70%.
Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.

Stop pulling numbers out of thin air, please.

In reality, it's estimated that Windows has almost an 89% share, OS X is almost 10%, and Linux is slightly under 1%. And I have a source, too.

This is fantasy - and fantasies are dangerous. Toyota doesn't become irrelevant in heavy industry because its shows its first loss in 71 years. Microsoft doesn't become irrrelevant in tech because its revenues and profits continue to grow in good times and bad.

Object Lesson #1: Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"

Object Lesson #2: The Moz Foundation and Google.

Life and death by the add-click.

Object Lesson #3:The Netbook at WalMart

Object Lesson #4: Operating system market share, Top Operation systems versions trend

This is fantasy - and fantasies are dangerous. Toyota doesn't become irrelevant in heavy industry because its shows its first loss in 71 years. Microsoft doesn't become irrrelevant in tech because its revenues and profits continue to grow in good times and bad.

Object Lesson #1: Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"

Object Lesson #2: The Moz Foundation and Google.

Life and death by the add-click.

Object Lesson #3:The Netbook at WalMart

Object Lesson #4: Operating system market share, Top Operation systems versions trend

Firefox currently has over 20% of the market share and growing

Wait till Google starts signing agreements with OEMs and Chrome is shipped as the default browser for both Windows and Linux boxes.
And I dont subscribe to the argument that Firefox users would forget/stop using google search, if Yahoo/MSN is set as default browser (Unless of course Mozilla explicitly makes it inconvenient for users to use Google). I would consider Firefox users to be capable to change their default search engine to whatever they prefer.

Firefox currently has over 20% of the market share and growing - if it continues to gain share then I can't see Google pulling out of an agreement where they're the default search offering for over 20% of people on the web.

Having said this, it's going to be difficult for Mozilla to find a revenue stream that even comes close to that from Google. If they want independence, they'll have a hard time finding it. Somehow I can't see Microsoft stepping in with a bid if Google were to eventually pull out...

I think he's talking about <1% market share. Also, despite Vista's unpopularity, OS X has been the main beneficiary, e.g.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpdt=1&qpct=4&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=95&qpnp=25

Month________Windows Mac Linux iPhone
December 2006 93.86% 5.67% 0.37% 0.00%
November 2008 89.62% 8.87% 0.83% 0.37%

In browser studies from performance to compliance to security, IE either comes in last or close to last, and Opera comes in either first or close to first. But still IE has over 50% market share, and Opera has less than 3%. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

This explains why Vista has 20% of the desktop, up from 12% in January, and OSX 9%, up from 8% in January. Top Operating System Share Trend

What is striking are the hardware specs and pricing for consumer Vista in late 2008:
Walmart.com has 31 Vista laptops with 4 GB RAM, 14 of these running 64 bit Vista Premium - with 64 bit Vista starting at $800.

Apologies, better link at the source -

Windows 89.62%
Mac 8.87%
Linux 0.83%
iPhone 0.37%
Playstation 0.04%
SunOS 0.01%