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FYI: Net Applications =/= NetApp (formerly known as Network Appliance)

Open Source is simply better quality than the sorry excuse for a technology solution that makes up Microsoft's products.
While linux still isn't accepted in the wider community (I for one have had several of my peers sigh or make nasty comments when they have seen me running Ubuntu on my laptop), have a look at Firefox.
Firefox is an accepted alternative to Internet Explorer. It has all the same features, and because it is open source it has countless plugins and modifications which allows for a great deal of customization by the average-joe computer user.
Now, if you look at the comment John Lilly makes about Firefox's shares hitting 20%, he notes that hitting the milestone is something which "just a few years ago most would have considered impossible."
In other words, Firefox's popularity increased exponentially once it became accepted and people wised up to the fact that it beat the crap out of Internet Explorer.
Linux is the same. The general view has changed from "What's Linux?" to "Only strange people with ponytails and T-shirts with penguins use Linux" to "People that know a lot about computers sometimes use Linux".
It is inevitable that that view will change to "Everyone can use Linux" and then the floodgates will open as, like with Firefox, people realize that there is an alternative to Microsoft software.

Microsoft knows this.
And they are afraid.

Yeah, I'm sure it's completely true too, since a PR Company would never lie or bend the truth on behalf of a client. Right?

There are other sources for browser stats: Browser Market Share for February, 2008 The source Net Applications.

The story isn't about obscure tech. It's about familiar tech that survives because users see no compelling reason to abandon it.

Yes, you are right. It is statistical noise when Firefox goes down by 0.64% according to a single source (NetApplications.com), and it is a great achievement when Firefox steadily increases its market share over a very long period of time and according to many different sources.

The statistics are provided by NetApplications.com. Their numbers come from aggregating browser stats from all sites using their service -- hardly a statistically-valid sample of the web audience. Read more about it here.

Assuming that their statistics result from site monitoring (as on http://netapplications.com/, the surveyor's website, one of the services they offer is website monitoring), there would be no overlap, as the site monitoring would simply reflect what percentage dual-(or more)-browser users used either given browser.

I.e., it would simply reflect how many times the site was accessed from any particular brand of browser, and it could not account for whether users used one or more browsers (it would, of course, reflect what percentage such people used each of their browsers, but it could not tell whether those percentages resulted from one or more different users).