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Mac has a small share relative to Windows

Yes, but consider that 9% is a lot less small than it used to be... (a few years back = http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9

(assuming the method they used to determine this metric is valid, of course)

Amazing that there are no real exploits.

90% for windows. 8.9% for Mac Meaning 1.1% for Linux and other Operating Systems.

ominous voice : There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of... oh forget that.

Oh man, just RTFA's links:

Percent for Jan Aug Nov

Windows 91.50 90.66 89.62

Mac 7.57 7.86 8.87

Linux 0.64 0.93 0.83

iPhone 0.13 0.30 0.37

Playstation 0.03 0.04 0.04

FreeBSD 0.00 0.00 0.01

Other 0.13 0.21 0.26

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

The iPhone platform is less than one year old, and at 0.4% has a presence half the size of Linux. Operating System Market Share

MS Vista has 20% of the market, up 8% since January. Linux 0.8%, up 0.2%. Pathetic.

In rounded numbers, Windows - all versions - still has a 90% share.

It takes a Geek to read statistical significance in a 1% drop in a webstat.

The most useful way to read these numbers is simply as a reminder of the growing number of web-enabled mobile devices and home appliances -- a reminder as well that both Apple and Microsoft are both significant and successful players in these emerging markets.

That means it accounts for about 22% of Windows computers, or 1 in 4.4. Since Vista has been out for over two years now

I did a little reconnoiter-ing around the web-site to see what Apple's adoption rate is for comparison: you can see here that MacIntel surpassed Mac OS (the powerPC chip) in September of 2007. Apple first started shipping Intel processors in January of 2006. So ~1.8 years from when the first started shipping, they reached 50% saturation of the new product. Granted, it's not the same thing as Vista versus XP because there's no way to upgrade a powerpc computer to an Intel, but most people seem to be installing Vista on new computers, so maybe it's not that bad of a comparison. Maybe people who were buying macs were buying them more often, or maybe they really had a lot of new buyers whereas MS has pretty much saturated its market.

Another comparison might be made from the point releases of Mac OS X: from the 2008 keynote, Jobs said they achieved 20% install-base with leopard (10.5) in 3 months. However, that was just a point release, it's not a very big decision to upgrade or anything. The best comparison might be for the uptake of Mac OS 9 versus 10.0, but I'm having trouble finding data on that one.

Of course, do you trust Apple to report this data honestly?

From the original data, "Windows" and "Microsoft" are synonymous, unless Windows is specified as Vista, XP, or 2000. The actual data is as follows:

Windows XP 66.31%
Windows Vista 20.45%
MacIntel 6.51%
Mac OS 2.35%
Windows 2000 1.56%
Linux 0.83%
Windows NT 0.77%
iPhone 0.37%
Windows 98 0.29%
Windows ME 0.17%
Windows CE 0.05%
Pike 0.05%
Unknown 0.05%
iPod 0.05%
Series60 0.03%
Hiptop 0.03%
PLAYSTATION 3 0.02%
PSP 0.02%
Windows 95 0.01%
SunOS 0.01%
Nintendo Wii 0.01%
Win64 0.01%
FreeBSD 0.01%
Wi 0.00%

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

They claim these are actual usage statistics (presumably from net usage, so already a bit dubious regarding older systems), not sales statistics. It looks like MacOS and MacIntel are "Apple"- I'm assuming MacOS is everything not running on Intel chips, and MacIntel is the newer OSX versions. They seem to group everything "linux" as anything with the Linux kernel. Again, these are net machines, so there's no accounting for server usage. Hate to say it, but this is not the Year of the Linux Desktop. This is more likely the Year of the Apple Anti-trust Lawsuit.

I just don't trust these stats (and that's not because they don't say what I want them to), from the Net Applications site:

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. 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.

So it's all customers from some analytics service these guys own. But what type of sites use their service? It's hard to believe these figures do not have a built-in bias due to the types of sites providing them.

By far the most popular analytics service is Google Analytics.* If Google were to produce figures like these, I'd be more inclined to believe them, as their analytics software is used on a decent cross-section of sites, including technical ones like Slashdot.

My own data -- with bias due to having a technical audience -- across two sites, says roughly: Windows 75%; Mac 9%; Linux 13% (with 3% AWStats reports as 'Unknown', and other sundry OSs like BSD, OS/2, AmigaOS, BeOS etc.) None of my sites use Net Applications' software, and get around 125,000 visitors a month.

* Sorry I haven't a citation for this, but just look at the source code of almost any site and you'll see a Javascript block from Google Analytics. Also, see this unscientific evidence.

Learn to live with it.

The iPhone as a platform has been around for less than a year and at a 0.4% market share has fully half the presence of Linux on the web.

Windows holds a 90% share, the Mac 9% and Linux 0.8%.Operating System Market Share

The numbers for Linux aren't likely to look significantly better any time soon. Top Operating Systems Version Trend [Dec 1, 2008]

Learn to live with it.

The iPhone as a platform has been around for less than a year and at a 0.4% market share has fully half the presence of Linux on the web.

Windows holds a 90% share, the Mac 9% and Linux 0.8%.Operating System Market Share

The numbers for Linux aren't likely to look significantly better any time soon. Top Operating Systems Version Trend [Dec 1, 2008]

Net Applications OS Trends [For 1 Dec 2208]

XP 66% -9% [from Jan 08]
Vista 20% + 8%
W2K 2% -1%
OSX Intel 7% +3%
Linux 0.8% +0.2%
OSX 2% -1%
All others 2% Unchanged
Top Operating System Share Trends

The iPhone has 0.4% of the market.

The iPhone as a platform has existed for less than one year. But as a presence on the web it has grown to fully half the size of Linux. Operating System Market Share

The year ends as it began. If you are a hardware vendor in the home and SOHO market, there is little reason for you to look beyond OSX and Windows.

Net Applications OS Trends [For 1 Dec 2208]

XP 66% -9% [from Jan 08]
Vista 20% + 8%
W2K 2% -1%
OSX Intel 7% +3%
Linux 0.8% +0.2%
OSX 2% -1%
All others 2% Unchanged
Top Operating System Share Trends

The iPhone has 0.4% of the market.

The iPhone as a platform has existed for less than one year. But as a presence on the web it has grown to fully half the size of Linux. Operating System Market Share

The year ends as it began. If you are a hardware vendor in the home and SOHO market, there is little reason for you to look beyond OSX and Windows.

and about seventy-five miles back down the road.

The Net Applications webstats are global and show a 0.71% share for Linux. Operating System Market Share There is no way you can massage a statistic so pathetic into something significant.

Valve's games demand significant horsepower. They are not being played on the Linux Netbook or the XO.

Of the 17 netbooks being offered at Walmart.com this holiday season, at least 12 run XP or Vista. Most priced at $350 with an Atom CPU, 1 GB RAM and a 120 GB HDD. Is it necessary to add that not one Linux netbook "is available in stores?"

Of the 17 netbooks being offered at Walmart.com this holiday season, at least 12 run XP or Vista. Most priced at $350 with an Atom CPU, 1 GB RAM and a 120 GB HDD. Is it necessary to add that not one Linux netbook "is available in stores?"

Google's revenues are almost entirely consumer add based.

Which implies that the foundation could be badly hurt in a recession.

2011 isn't that far off. If the recession cuts deep enough Google will have to retrench - and Firefox may not be off limits.

The trend lines for the web browsers are looking rather flat: Top Browser Share Trend

IE 6/7/8 75% FFX 2/3 20% Safari 5%.

There probably aren't any big gains to be made here.

Problem is they've missed the boat. Linux already has compilers for multiple CPUs

Look at this chart..

http://www.top500.org/stats/list/32/os

Windows HPC 2008 is on 4 machines out of 500. (+1 is windows 2003 if you want to count that)
Linux is on 454 out of 500 super computers

Which Operating System do you think is going to have better tools to support Super Computing?

Problem is they've missed the boat. Windows already has all the tools needed for desktop computing

Look at this chart..

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

Windows has 90% of the market
Linux has less than 1%

Which Operating System do you think is going to have better tools for desktop computing?
__________________________

For all of you angry mods... i know it's a flawed analogy (and it's not even about cars...), but the parent was saying Microsoft should not even try since they're not at the top of the game. I think it's a pretty stupid way to think. Let them all try and develop new things. Someone will eventually come out with something that makes parralel computing easier and we'll all gain something from it even if it come from MS.

Rate? If you have say 20 users, it's easy to get to 40 users and report 100% growth. Microsoft can never report any significant growth, because they own 90% of the market.

While it's true that smaller sample sizes are prone to more error, a growth of 90% to 91% is the same number of people as 1% to 2%. I also still don't see a correlation between growth rate which is what I was talking about, and Windows currently (that's a snapshot of Jan 2k8) having 90% and Linux having .6% once again - 2k8. That especially in light of the data in the article you gave (linked below)

It's the classic false reasoning of expecting trends to continue forever.

When was it that I said the trend would continue forever? I know I said "things look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7" - which means the trend will continue until Microsoft does something valuable with one of its upcoming products, not that it will continue forever.

To both of you (or as I somewhat suspect you twice Golias) This trend isn't a one month thing. In fact here is the raw data linked to by the article you, yourself chose out. As you can see the trend is not limited to a single month. Windows has shrunk to a 90.46% share today from a 94.16% share November 2k6. The shrink has been quite consistent. Linux has grown from a paltry 0.37% share to 0.71% today and Mac has gone from 5.39% to 8.21%. Every one of these changes may jump around a bit month-to-month but the overall trend is very apparent. Unless MS gets its act together there's little reason that won't continue.

, maybe the company will finally implode and let other OSes get a greater market-share.

newsflash, other OS's are already gaining market share.... http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9

And at least some of those were actually activated and are actually in use!

Not only that, but apparently they're even connected to the intertubes.

Uncomfortable stats, those. twitter says the "methodology is flawed", but can't actually point out why.

When Microsoft's revenue fell 24% a few quarters ago, willy (that's his real name) wrote up a storm of lame journals detailing why "M$" was dying; next quarter when they continued to shovel money, he was strangely silent. He's been smoking the BoycottNovell weed a bit to strongly, where they have parties when NOVL or MSFT are down 2% and find other things to do when they're up by 15%. That's been willy's war chant for the last few months.

So you don't need Microsoft to tell you how many Vista machines our out there, there are independent metrics for that.

Uncomfortable stats, those. "Flawed" for reasons unknown when presented to zealots like you and willy. Funny, how you show up everywhere he's posting, too.

That would, I suspect, as a charitable estimate, strip Slashdot of 90% of its audience.

Net Application's Market Share Webstats for October 2008:

MS Vista 19%
Up +1% [from Sept 08]

OSX MacIntel 6%
Up +0.2%

Linux 0.7%
Down -0.2%

Top Operating System Share Trend

In the year of the netbook, Win NT has 0.8% of the desktop market and Win 9x 0.5% Operating System Market Share

It is not easy when looking at numbers like these to make the argument that the home and SOHO user is spending much time looking "under the hood" or has any desire whatsoever for a deeper engagement with system internals.

That would, I suspect, as a charitable estimate, strip Slashdot of 90% of its audience.

Net Application's Market Share Webstats for October 2008:

MS Vista 19%
Up +1% [from Sept 08]

OSX MacIntel 6%
Up +0.2%

Linux 0.7%
Down -0.2%

Top Operating System Share Trend

In the year of the netbook, Win NT has 0.8% of the desktop market and Win 9x 0.5% Operating System Market Share

It is not easy when looking at numbers like these to make the argument that the home and SOHO user is spending much time looking "under the hood" or has any desire whatsoever for a deeper engagement with system internals.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

Sorry to disappoint you.

Linux seems to be doing great though. In about five years it should totally surpass Windows 2000.

or to crunch the numbers another way - Windows lost 5.5% of the desktop market in a little over a year..

Are you talking still about these stats? If so, your math is way off. Yes, WinXP + Vista + Win2000 together have lost, but not 5.5%, but only about 1.6%

Jan 08 XP 75% + Vista 12% + W2K 3% = 90%
Sep 08 XP 69% + Vista 18% + W2K 2% = 89%

Win NT, Win 98, Win ME and the stray Win 95 system retain a combined share of 1% [rounded]:

Operating System Market Share

Which makes the net loss 0%.

It depends, I suppose, on how low your expectations are. Top Operating System Share Trend

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8 ;)

[Windows Mobile market share] dropped from 24% in 2004 to 12% this year.

Of what? Of the smart phone market world-wide? Or US only?

I know one thing for sure, though, that current US/EU www market shares are:

68.67% - Windows XP
18.33% - Windows Vista
8.23 - Mac OS X
0.91% - Linux ...
0.32% - iPhone
0.06% - Windows CE (Mobile)

Considering how young iPhone is, it is beating the crap out of the ancient Windows Mobile.

The source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

One message to Windows Mobile would be appropriate -- die already.

According to one source it is already a long way past the Mac. In fact it's more than double, at 18.3% to the Mac's 8.2%. Linux? Less than 1%.

Microsoft is the only US industrial company to be given a AAA rating by S&P and Moody's in ten years.

It's a damn short list:

In addition to Microsoft: ADP, Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Rounding out the list for S&P is Pfizer; for Moody's, it's Toyota. Microsoft mint [Sept 27]

This is a slump? Operating System Market Share, Top Operating System Share Trend

Microsoft is the only US industrial company to be given a AAA rating by S&P and Moody's in ten years.

It's a damn short list:

In addition to Microsoft: ADP, Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Rounding out the list for S&P is Pfizer; for Moody's, it's Toyota. Microsoft mint [Sept 27]

This is a slump? Operating System Market Share, Top Operating System Share Trend

That only works if every webpage in the world decides to say 'FUCK YOU!' to IE6. And that would require every web developer to say 'FUCK YOU!' to 25% of the web population. That will not happen.

The ordinary user does not care about what browser they're using. They care about the accessing content. If one site says 'sorry, please upgrade your browser.' then users will simply migrate to another site. And that site'll have more visitors.

Take Facebook, for example. They had a whole fancy Ajax-y redesign. They also didn't support it in IE6, and told people to upgrade or use Flock, Firefox or Safari. Fantastic news - but the point here is that IE6 users were not excluded outright, because it made best sense for them [Facebook] as a business.

As someone who's hacked about with CSS and javascript a bit, I would rejoice if I heard IE6 had just died a long, drawn-out and tortuous death. Firefox has considerably helped with this, but non-technical people do not care. And since lots of non-technical people use IE6, developers cannot stop supporting it; it's a chicken and egg problem.

Unfortunately, short of a Windows Update that upgrades IE6 to 7 or 8, IE6 is not going anywhere soon.

When the dice are loaded in your favor, you don't need luck.

Microsoft is the first U.S. "industrial" company to get a AAA credit rating from S&P and Moody's in ten years.

It's become a damn short list.

If your employer is trying to raise money, the odds are 7 in 10 that his bonds are rated "below investment grade" - junk.

In November Vista will have 20% of the desktop market - based on mass-market webstats - and Windows 90% of the whole.

Top Operating System Share Trend

No add-ons. I want my ad block plus please.

According to one source, there are about 1.5 billion Internet users in the world. Another source estimates that maybe 20%, or 300 million of them, are using Firefox.

Now, Mozilla.org says that most popular add-on right now is Video DownloadHelper with about 340K downloads each week. However, its developers have released 32 versions in the last 22 months, so a big chunk of downloads will be for upgraders. Let's assume that a full one-half of all downloads are first-time users and not people upgrading from last week's version, and that 100% of downloaders actually use it. That means that Video DownloadHelper has about 16,000,000 users, or about 5% of Firefox's user base.

You like add-ons. I like add-ons. Objectively, though, we're a very small minority of users. The numbers look even worse for your position when you consider that the majority of Internet users are browsing with Internet Explorer, and therefore wouldn't miss add-ons were they to switch to Chrome.

There are a lot of reasons why people might not be using Chrome. The lack of add-ons is almost certainly not an important one, statistically speaking.

.

No they didn't.

What you had were small communities built around hopelessly incompatible systems from Apple. Atari, Commodore, Texas Instruments, etc.

The numbers were never as big as the Geek remembers them.

The C-64 was remarkably successful in the 8-bit era with 30 million sold.

Windows in 2008 has one billion users.

When you started using computers, you became computer literate, just like everyone's more or less washing-machine-literate and DVD-player-literate

No you didn't.

You became application-literate.

Magazines like Creative Computing and Compute faded into the background as computers became more powerful and applications more sophisticated and professional.

People stopped looking "under the hood" for the same reason their grandparents abandoned the Tin Lizzy for a Ford V-8. The machine was complex and powerful - delivered a comfortable ride - and if you needed a mechanic, there was always a garage.

Of course, this has now bitten Microsoft too: it's one reason why Vista and Office 2007 are so unpopular.

Microsoft is the first industrial company to earn a AAA credit rating in 10 years.

Office 2007 flies off the shelves - the 700 pound gorilla in PC software sales regardless of platform.

It's bigger than games, bigger than anything.

Vista has 18% of the desktop market, based not on licenses sold, but users on the web. Top Operating System Share Trend

Top Operating System Share Trend

October 07
Vista 8%
OSX 6%
Linux 0.5%

August 08
Vista 18%
OSX 8%
Linux 0.9%

Net Applications tracks users on the web not corporate licenses.
OEM Vista is almost exclusively Vista Premium with 64bit Vista becoming increasing visible even at Walmart. HP Pavililion
This is a real intrusion on territory claimed by the Mac.

Right because upgrading Linux installations always works every time.

Not every time. You may have broken hardware, or you may erase half of distribution after installing it. Then it won't work.

Umm, you mean you try it and it fails and Linux apologists tell you you have broken or hardare or RTFM. And then you waste ages trying to find someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

Linux is about progress, not back compatibility and no one is willing to do the work to maintain old ABIs or filesystem formats. In fact they often deride Microsoft for caring about it.

In fact, you know absolutely nothing about Linux. ABI changes very slowly, and older versions will work with modern kernel, and may require old libraries that usually are provided in "compatibility" package for this very purpose.

Hmm, that's ok if someone bothers to do it. Otherwise you need to do it yourself. And my point is how many people are going to get it right for a 13 year old disti.

E.g. Firefox 3 won't work on Fedora Core 4 which is a lot newer than 13 years.
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=417678

What Microsoft does is different -- it has SHITTY OLD INTERFACE, and it continues throwing shit into the newer and newer versions of its OS supposedly to provide compatibility with old shit, but really to avoid making any progress toward anything better. Instead of deprecating obviously bad systems such as most of Win32, everything new is either added or built on top of it. The reason for it is very simple -- it's very difficult to provide a compatibility layer on another platform that will imitate extremely bad, poorly designed, bug-ridden subsystem in a way that will support all "creative uses" and workarounds that accumulated over decades of evolution of such a massive engineering failure. If Windows wasn't that bad, Wine (or Windows interface under OS/2 before it, or Wabi,...) would be orders of magnitude more simple, and it would become "better Windows than Windows". With Windows being full of unmaintainable finicky crap every imitation of it necessarily has to be full of unmaintainable finicky crap.

You say shit a lot. But it's sort of interesting that I can run Firefox 3 on Windows 2000, which is a lot older than FC4.

And that's because of all the work people like Raymond Chen do on making sure that software works after an upgrade. Because Microsoft want to sell you that upgrade. In the FOSS world no one gives a shit because there's no money in it. If some developer does some refactoring that inconveniences a user, the user goes to the community which is full of people like you yelling that they are idiots and the sort of work Raymond does is shit. That's why Linux has negligable market share

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

Hmm, doesn't that seem a bit of an ad hominem attack to you? Even if it were true how does it affect what I'm saying.

You and other Microsoft defenders have literally flooded this discussion with your comments. Obviously you are trying to create an impression of validity by posting large number of comments with unsupported claims instead of participating in a discussion.

I just like trolling people like you who will defend Linux without knowing anything about how much work good commercial companies put into migration plans and ABI stability. No one cares about that shit on Linux. If you want it to work you need to reinstall a new OS every few months.

If this is true, please tell me what embedded systems are. Then I will know what to avoid like plague because it's made by a person so hopelessly

4% of the people that visit a geek site like www.w3schools.com use Linux. It's a lot less elsewhere

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

Windows XP ----- 69.49%
Windows Vista -- 17.85%
MacIntel -------- 5.44%
Mac OS ---------- 2.42%
Windows 2000 ---- 1.93%
Linux ----------- 0.93%
Windows NT ----- 0.72%
Windows 98 ----- 0.38%

This article is lame in the extreme, but that's ok because slashdotters will use it as whacking material. I can already imagine thousands of slashdotters cleaning cum off the monitor upon reading this.

Oh, and let's point out that, according to web usage stats, Vista has 3 times the share of Mac and orders of magnitude more users than Linux.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

Linux has 1% of the global market. Top Operating System Share Trend

There are enormous economies of scale in the Windows marketplace The cost of the OEM install scarcely matters.

For the better part of a decade, WalMart has been teasing the geek with a merry-go-round of short-lived OEM Linux promotions that always give way to the Windows system with stronger specs and a marginally higher price.

According to NetApplications, Chrome has around 1% usage share. That's pretty good for a browser still only in beta.

It's pedigree suggests that it may be in beta for some time to come...

According to NetApplications, Chrome has around 1% usage share. That's pretty good for a browser still only in beta.

Have a look at this graph. The marketshare of Mozilla Firefox is steadily increasing.

I doubt Google are going to try and compete with Firefox. Chrome will rather be aimed at Internet Explorer users. Expect to see 'Unhappy with your web browser? Try Google Chrome!' ads whenever you are on Google.com with IE soon.

Vista hasn't failed in the home and SOHO markets: Top Operating System Share Trend In these - global - webstats Vista is the only OS showing any significant growth at all.

Oh boy. Because I know that no one actually uses Vista, I suspect someone has taken these steps...

Step 1 - Find a list of commercial sites tracked by this tracking service (maybe write an advanced program to crawl through web pages).

Step 2 - Virtualize Windows (or any other OS) so that it is running many times.

Step 3- Use IP spoofing and hit all these pages recursively at randomized time delays.

Step 4 - ????

Step 5 - Profit from the dodgy stats.

Vista hasn't failed in the home and SOHO markets: Top Operating System Share Trend In these - global - webstats Vista is the only OS showing any significant growth at all.

See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years.

He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995.

Microsoft Office Ultimate for full-time students in the U.S. is $60:

Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Access 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007

The apps might in the cloud.

But I'll take the odds that the office of 2019 or 2025 isn't going to look all that different from the office of 2008.

______

Net Applications isn't tracking licenses - it is tracking users:

160 million hits to its clients's websites each moth

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites
# 43% are commerce sites
# 18% are corporate sites
# 10% are content sites
# 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About Our Market Share Statistics

Vista hasn't failed in the home and SOHO markets: Top Operating System Share Trend In these - global - webstats Vista is the only OS showing any significant growth at all.

See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years.

He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995.

Microsoft Office Ultimate for full-time students in the U.S. is $60:

Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Access 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007

The apps might in the cloud.

But I'll take the odds that the office of 2019 or 2025 isn't going to look all that different from the office of 2008.

______

Net Applications isn't tracking licenses - it is tracking users:

160 million hits to its clients's websites each moth

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites
# 43% are commerce sites
# 18% are corporate sites
# 10% are content sites
# 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About Our Market Share Statistics

And every month Net Applications posts global stats showing Vista gaining market share Top Operating System Share Trend.

Net Applications isn't looking at licenses, it is looking at users accessing the net from outside the corporate/institutional environment. I don't think the geek has ever quite grasped how wide this chasm has become.

Slashdot itself had an article not too long about Apple reaching #3.

The link was a few posts above, exactly like I said.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

Apple has 7.76% global market share. They're almost at 8%.

FIY:

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.

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
43% are commerce sites
18% are corporate sites
10% are content sites
29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc.. About Our Market Share Statistics

Net Applications stats are global.

Its clients - for reasons which should be blindingly obvious - are interested only in meaningful stats about users, not licenses.

Plenty of people are buying computers with Vista and switching to another OS, or downgrading to XP.

The numbers simply aren't there to support this argument.

Vista is approaching 20% of the market. Top Operating System Share Trend You can't expect expect Linux ports if entry level DX9l/DX10 outperforms OGL.

The link: Top Operating System Share Trend

I believe it was the IBM exec whose best estimate put Linux at 0.6% of the market.

The numbers haven't much improved since. Top Operating System Share Trend

If we had a system that enshrined the peoples right to have access to ideas, rather than one that enshrined the right of individuals and corporations to erect barriers, this wouldn't be happening.

The geek is as prone to escalating feuds and factions into holy warfare as any medieval theologian. I am quite confident that where I would see an open passage another would see a wall.

It can be both - restful - and engaging - to bargain with someone who thinks simply in terms of self-interest, the profit to be made in the goods and services they provide.

But then I was raised in the elementally capitalist environment of the Farmer's Market.