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The graph you cited doesn't show units sold at all. It shows a snapshot of web usage over a time period, which is going to be heavily influenced by the installed base. Try this graph from the same site instead. It paints a better picture of the trends occurring. Plus, with Nokia cutting off Symbian development to bet the company on Windows Phone, their Symbian line is only going to nosedive more in the coming months and years.

Yeah... when you look at the global stats (not just the US and Europe) you see that about a third of all smart phones sold each quarter run Symbian OS. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201101-201112-bar

That are not sales numbers. Don't pretend they are.

Yeah... when you look at the global stats (not just the US and Europe) you see that about a third of all smart phones sold each quarter run Symbian OS. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201101-201112-bar

It is easy to forget that when we talk about iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone, we are talking about touch screen smart phones - which still make a tiny portion of the number of handsets sold globally, but a huge portion of the revenues earned by the industry.

Pity that Tech Crunch has chosen to refer to comScore, which notoriously overestimates the market share of Microsoft products, in this article, which obviously deals only with search-engine market share in the United States. If, instead, we look at StatCounter's statistics, we can see that worldwide, Google is sailing along at over 90 % with no discernable dips, while neither Bing nor Yahoo! make it up to 4 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20080701-20120113). According to the same source, in the United States, Google commands over 80 % of the search market, while neither Yahoo ! nor Bing reach up till 10 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20080701-20120113).... Henri

Pity that Tech Crunch has chosen to refer to comScore, which notoriously overestimates the market share of Microsoft products, in this article, which obviously deals only with search-engine market share in the United States. If, instead, we look at StatCounter's statistics, we can see that worldwide, Google is sailing along at over 90 % with no discernable dips, while neither Bing nor Yahoo! make it up to 4 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20080701-20120113). According to the same source, in the United States, Google commands over 80 % of the search market, while neither Yahoo ! nor Bing reach up till 10 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20080701-20120113).... Henri

India cited is just an example of where by this spring more Indians will use IOS or Andriod to read the news, browse the net, and do other things than a desktop!

Nope, India is just an example of where cheap feature phones are finally giving people access to the web -
just look at mobile OS share. iOS is less than percent, Android (probably in cheaper not-far-from-feature-phone variants) is 4%.

> India cited is just an example of where by this spring more Indians will use IOS or Andriod to read the news, browse the net, and do other things than a desktop!

Nope. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-IN-monthly-201012-201112 - iOS and Android are just blips and rise of mobile browsing seems to be thanks to cheap modern feature phones.

"Michael Dell has a vested interest in telling people that PCs will rule forever"

Well he also should have a vested interest in making sure he does not miss out on the tablet market which is Dell's number one threat.

Take a look at this statistic from poorer, but high-tech India? Yep, that is right. By April more Indians will use a phone/tablet than a desktop to browse the net, answer emails, run skype, etc.

Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe is where the growth markets are. These people will use phones and not PCS for internet access as this link shows.

Even back in the 1st workd, once people realize you do not need a big expensive bulky crappy Windows desktop they will stop using them. Then what Dell? I hope it has a plan?

IBM tried to stop servers, spread FUD showing every business with more than 50 people needs a mainframe, etc. How well did that work?

Maybe in the US you are right.

Check out internet usage in a poorer country that thrives on internet access compared to the US?

India cited is just an example of where by this spring more Indians will use IOS or Andriod to read the news, browse the net, and do other things than a desktop!

The US is a mature market where people only buy new equipment when it breaks down. No growth market here. Just look at backward corporate America being run by CFOs dirt cheap on believing any investment in tech like newer than IE 6 is always an expense and not an investment? Consumers are poorer now than ever and feel no need to upgrade. India in comparison is a HUGE growth market, as well as the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe and is where the money is. Dell will only be relevant in some offices and government buildings, while their citizens will prefer tablets, phones, and netbooks. Also most employers in these countries are much smaller and do not mind running it on a phone or tablet unlike the US. They simply do not have the capital to buy 2-3 desktops running full versions of Office, Quickbooks, Windows etc.

If Michael Dell wont tap into that market a competitor will. I would sell Dell stock if I owned any right now. You can hate tablet UIs like Metro all you want. The real money is in these devices and PC is going the way of the mini computer and mainframe FAST.

The keyboard and mouse is probably going to go away too as Windows 8 is frustrating and almost useless with it. We will all be using our screens as big cell phones running only one app at a time, unless MS makes BIG changes to metro like porting the taskbar. Without that and overlapping Windows I am holding out on Windows 7 myself. However, if I were only making $4600 a year in India, a smartphone would be a much better bet for me.

Maybe in the US you are right.

Check out internet usage in a poorer country that thrives on internet access compared to the US?

India cited is just an example of where by this spring more Indians will use IOS or Andriod to read the news, browse the net, and do other things than a desktop!

The US is a mature market where people only buy new equipment when it breaks down. No growth market here. Just look at backward corporate America being run by CFOs dirt cheap on believing any investment in tech like newer than IE 6 is always an expense and not an investment? Consumers are poorer now than ever and feel no need to upgrade. India in comparison is a HUGE growth market, as well as the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe and is where the money is. Dell will only be relevant in some offices and government buildings, while their citizens will prefer tablets, phones, and netbooks. Also most employers in these countries are much smaller and do not mind running it on a phone or tablet unlike the US. They simply do not have the capital to buy 2-3 desktops running full versions of Office, Quickbooks, Windows etc.

If Michael Dell wont tap into that market a competitor will. I would sell Dell stock if I owned any right now. You can hate tablet UIs like Metro all you want. The real money is in these devices and PC is going the way of the mini computer and mainframe FAST.

The keyboard and mouse is probably going to go away too as Windows 8 is frustrating and almost useless with it. We will all be using our screens as big cell phones running only one app at a time, unless MS makes BIG changes to metro like porting the taskbar. Without that and overlapping Windows I am holding out on Windows 7 myself. However, if I were only making $4600 a year in India, a smartphone would be a much better bet for me.

You can view mobile data usage stats by region here:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201012-201112

Quick facts:
  - worldwide Symbian indeed still trumps android and iOS
  - in the US symbian usage is non existent; iOS & android equal
  - in Asia symbian is dominant, iOS non existent, android is just starting
  - In Europe symbian is falling under 10%, android is steadily eating from iOS market

They are web usage stats not handset sales. So the 60% of phones which are "dumb" generated only 26% of traffic on sites tracked by NetApps.

I like StatCounter a lot more just because you can drill down.
http://gs.statcounter.com/

I do with google analytics would release data like this. I believe they are the largest stat site by a mile now.

StatCounter's Worldwide numbers show iOS and Android about even.

have access to a great deal of actual and current mobile usage data, and this is just completely at odds with reality.

That is my experience too. Statcounter is more representative of what I'm seeing: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-monthly-201012-201112

I'm looking at stats right now that show it peaked above 30%: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201111

They are measuring it by how http client announces itself to a cite (which client is specified in the http header). Most scripting libraries will put Mozilla in that header by default. So this data is scewed by all the crawlers running on the web. These are just scripts announcing themselves to be Firefox rather than actual Firefox browsers.

If the copyright terms were not draconian, scarcity would be much more temporary.

I agree with a shorter copyright term, something like 5 years in this day and age would be reasonable.

Firefox, by the way never dominated. It never broke past 20% of the market share.

I'm looking at stats right now that show it peaked above 30%: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201111

Also, I said, "dominate or at least does very well". What's significant is that IE in its heyday had a virtually monopoly on the browser, and according to those statistics is down to about 40%.

And Chrome is not developed through an OSS model as much as through professional development model (Google makes it and gives it away).

There's no rule in the open source model about who is allowed to create the code or for what reasons.

PHP does not dominate by any means and I would argue is largely considered sub par in quality to all other solutions in the same domain.

The LAMP stack is quite popular for small sites, and even some small sites that grew big (like Facebook). Overall on servers Linux popularity exceeds that of Microsoft and runs a lot of the Net.

Or may be "because they're the only viable alternative"?

Here, for example, Russia does have a real competing search engine, so google's dominance not so clear cut: http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-RU-monthly-201011-201111

US has Google and nearly unusable Bing and Yahoo, China has Baidu and nearly unusable Google.

But how do you explain the 80% market share of Baidu?

The same way you can explain Google's 80% market share in the US?
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-201011-201111

That is to say, that they're popular because they deliver what people are after?

Then go look the numbers up and compile them into groups yourself.

Source

The "big big majority" is still on XP?

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201011-201111
Vista - 11.12%
XP - 37.91%
Seven - 41.13%

IE 9 & 10 are perfectly relevant to talk about today in regards to corporate desktops.

Sites like g.statcounter show a different picture of XP marketshare if you search for operating systems under the US. XP is dying FAST. XP had only 1 in 4 users in the US and 1 in 3 in Europe with Windows 7 quickly taking 10 - 15% marketshare year after year. My guess is most are corporate and they know time is running out.

The rest of the 50% you see quoted in Slashdot from around the world are from China which skew the results due to piracy. Same is true with IE 6 usage as no one outside Asia uses it really as WPA makes sure you have a legit copy of XP before you can upgrade and banks require ActiveX so your stuck with it.

Corporations are either in the planning stages or will be in the planning stages after January on Windows 7 migrations according to Forbes. If 26% of people use Xp now it will be 12 - 8% at the current rate if not much less as corporations leave in force. Sadly you are right with refreshes and I cringe to be running Windows 7 in 2019 but you know these same businesses learned to love obsolete software and unlike Xp Windows 7 is MUCH MORE secure. Even less of a reason to leave. Unless of course METRO applets are the next wave of business software or something.

Hell look at how many corps are still running XP even though its two versions behind!

Look how many people are using Firefox 3.6 even though it's 5 versions behind!

Versions are a pointless distinction. It's simply that XP runs what they need, how they wanted it, and Vista did not do one or both of these tasks. I personally remember a field test where a proprietary application would simply not run on Vista and had to be partially rewritten to accommodate the changes in folders, permissions, and other things.

It's like the whole debacle with Linux interfaces (Gnome 3/Unity/KDE4) You can't expect to change people's environment as drastically as they've been doing and not get backlash.

Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these. hell if these numbers were from a company after TWENTY years of trying they'd be Chap 11 by now. No what Linux need extremely badly is a LEADER, someone with real vision and drive that will say "Ya know what? this is unacceptable. i'm not gonna accept 2%, hell I'm not gonna accept 5%. I'm not gonna quit until Ballmer and Cook are sitting at their desks looking at the numbers and thinking to themselves "WTF is this shit? How did THAT happen?" and Linux machines are in every damned store on the planet making both nervous as hell".

Like it or not there was a reason why guys like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison ended up on the top of the heap, and that was because they simply wouldn't settle. They would have never accepted numbers that low and then had articles written about their "success' they would have considered it a personal insult, found out what the competitors were doing to beat them, and then came out with something better and stomped the shit out of them.

As a retailer i'd love to see that day happen, i remember when there was a half a dozen different OSes and nearly as many CPUs to run them on, but that day will never get here if you continue on this path. Take that link and put in ANY date you want, you'll see the numbers are damned near flatline. Expecting the world to change and suddenly want to become geeker heavy and learn all about how the guts work just ain't gonna happen, see the iShiny or win 7 which your average 6 year old would probably have no problem running.

The way I see it there is really only two choices here, change or don't change. if you change and embrace consumers and give them what they want? You might seriously have a shot. you run faster on lower powered hardware, you don't force the user to get a new machine just to run the latest version and nobody else will be able to go lower even if you charged $5 for the OS it would still undercut anything MSFT has.

If you don't want to change that is your choice, then you'll just have to settle for a maximum of low single digits and the fact the vast majority of the planet is gonna ignore you. the OEMs, the retailers, and the users will all pretty much not care that you exist at all. but you can't eat your cake and have it too, because after 20 years the numbers clearly show you will never get the world to do things "your way" or act like you want them to. Business 101 give the customer something they want to buy and the numbers clearly show Linux hasn't done that, so I don't see how anybody can call less than 2% success. That is including the BSDs and other OSes BTW.

I was a FF user since it was called Phoenix, and then Firebird when it was a set of patches for Mozilla. I have been advocating its use since 2004 and switched many computers and friends over. It was a great browser at one time. Unfortunately, its time is coming to an end unless drastic things improve.

To me FF in the 2010s is more similiar to the IE 6 of the 2000s I ran away from. Its rapid release schedule increased the popularity of IEin the US from users and corporations not liking FF anymore. Chrome according to that site is about tied with FF worldwide and will soon overtake it for #2.

The saddest thing for me is not the current state of FF. It is the fact that I am using IE more and more and preferring IE 9 over FF. IE 10 will give FF a run for its money and even Chrome next March when it is released. It is complete opposite of 2005 now and it is amazing it happened in such a very short period of time.

Fix your bugs Mozilla and I may come back like I did with IE. Until then I recommend everyone use Chrome or IE. FF is just too unreliable.

Rather then pick a news website I actually dug up some stats..

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201010-201110

It's behind both opera and android with the trend that android is gaining more traction.

Not only that but your typical iPhone owner is going to be the first to ditch their product for the latest shiny which is even less incentive to waste money dealing with it.

Way more Android models, and they give the things away. And yet, Apple looks to be passing Android.

Just curious, where is this 70% share coming from? I see different stats here.

There is absolutely no need to look at brazil for linux support.

Thank god.

Top 5 Operating Systems in Brazil from October 2010 to September 2011

Not that the numbers for Portugal look any better.

Top 5 Operating Systems in Portugal from October 2010 to September 2011

There is absolutely no need to look at brazil for linux support.

Thank god.

Top 5 Operating Systems in Brazil from October 2010 to September 2011

Not that the numbers for Portugal look any better.

Top 5 Operating Systems in Portugal from October 2010 to September 2011

And Google really, really badly wants to change that. By far they're succeeding too. http://gs.statcounter.com/

Have you ever tried learning the most basic facts about something before making concrete claims about it? It works better that way.

You went trough all the countries, then followed up with how Opera has a tiny user base even in Norway... yet somehow completely missed Russia. Point is, the global trend isn't global, the different countries have their own distinct trends, that the UK is similar to the average doesn't mean much. Brazil seems to be absolutely in love with Chrome. In India Chrome is neck to neck with Firefox and both are going up in favour of IE. Chrome is gaining in Europe overall, but slowly with IE and Firefox battling for most of the market. In Chine nothing but IE matters and it's not that much better in Japan.

You can't just declare that the UK is somehow where the world will inevitably follow and cement it by attacking me with absurd accusations, I happened to know that Germany loves Firefox, so I didn't have to go through anything to find that, much less to find something about IE.

And Google really, really badly wants to change that. By far they're succeeding too. http://gs.statcounter.com/

Please explain how the UK is any more representative of "the rest of the world" than, say, Germany.

Excellent trolling, I salute you.

I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.

That the trend line has flatlined:

When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:

Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China

Germany

Excellent trolling, I salute you.

I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.

That the trend line has flatlined:

When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:

Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China

Germany

Excellent trolling, I salute you.

I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.

That the trend line has flatlined:

When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:

Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China

Germany

Excellent trolling, I salute you.

I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.

That the trend line has flatlined:

When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:

Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China

Germany

Excellent trolling, I salute you.

I don't think it is trolling to look at the evidence and say that Linux is really, really, struggling to gain new users.

That the trend line has flatlined:

When you look at the countries and regions in whicn the Linux geek has invested most of his emortional capital, the numbers are disheartening:

Brazil
Russian Federation
India
China

Germany

popularize ... the Linux desktop

According to StatCounter, Linux has a market share of 0.75%.

In comparison:
Windows: 85.00%
Mac OSX: 6.32%
iOS: 2.36%
Symbian: 2.15%
Android: 1.48%
GNU Linux: 0.75%
BlackBerry OS: 0.73%

I wouldn't call it popular just yet... Besides, I think Red Hat based distros like Fedora are much better than those based on Debian, and are the ones that should be introduced to new users. Fedora is way better than Ubuntu.

On another interesting note, it seems like Windows 7 just surpassed WinXP as the most popular OS, they're both holding around 40% market share. So yeah, Linux still needs some work, considering Windows 7 got there in just two years and XP was a hugely popular OS..

Apple’s share of the US personal computer market hasn’t been as low as 5% in over four years.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were talking US only - I guess you need to do that, otherwise the facts would show that Apple is about 6.8% of the worldwide market. In North America, you'll find it's less than 14%. Is that "popular"? Only with fanbois who respond and are too cowardly to use their name...

Sorry to burst your bubble... Facts are inconvenient things to fanbois, aren't they?

People (as in general users) were still not aware that there *was* any alternative

Why is that Microsoft's problem? Maybe Mozilla or Google or Opera should run some more ads. It's not Microsoft's job to educate the public about the competing browsers, especially if they're not doing anything to inhibit their performance or ability to be installed. If you want, you can remove practically all traces of IE from Windows.

The alternatives were doing well in terms of growth , but not in overall terms

I don't know how you can say that when both Chrome and Firefox are sitting around 25% global market share, and IE has steadily been losing market share for at least 4 years. How can you seriously tell me no one knows about alternative browsers when people have been leaving IE in droves for years now?

Facts are inconvenient things, aren't they? So what makes you think iOS is maintaining or gaining marketshare? It's sliding away...

I'd have to disagree. Firefox has reached a level of penetration beyond it being used by power users and their friends and family. It has a momentum of it's own. The figures for Firefox usage alone tell you that.

Really? The figures for Firefox show a nearly flat, but downward trend. The numbers for chrome show a significant upward trend.

Don't like w3schools? Let's try another site. Oh, look, that one shows the same downward trend for Firefox, too.

And a third site (warning: flash required) shows the same thing, too: Firefox has a downward trend.

I like Firefox, too, but the devs actions seem to be driving users away. I'm only using FF because of the addons (but I'm getting really tired of some breaking every month or two).

I have loads of friends who use Firefox on recommendation from a friend who wasn't a power user..

My friends and co-workers are slowly moving away from Firefox to chrome. While personal anecdotes may be fun, they're not all that useful.

Firefox 4,5 and 6, combined, have more than twice the users as Firefox 3.6.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201108-201108-bar

And the trend is for people to move towards the latest version (6 was released in August and already beat 4 for that month...)

I'm not sure what the alternative to a "real world website" is supposed to be, but this is the data that shows the story, averaged worldwide:

http://gs.statcounter.com/

You don't have to be a statistics major to see that Firefox and Chrome are going to intersect soon.

You'll see very different stats for individual countries. If you choose China, for example, you'll see that more people use Maxthon than Firefox, and that IE is still over 85%. If you choose Russia, on the other hand, you'll notice that more people use Opera than IE (Russians know a thing or two about avoiding malware).

The point is that, I'm not sure where your "real world website" is located, but the geography of your users is a good indicator of what the browser numbers will look like. Your "real world website" shows Safari over Chrome, so your numbers are not indicative of any country I've seen on statscounter. For all of the countries I've seen, Chrome has more users than Safari. It sounds like your "real world website" is a niche or hobbyist site, but whatever it is it looks like a statistical outlier with 7% of your users on mobile devices.

Not of that, but statcounter has nice graphs. From the beginning of this year Firefox has lost about 4% of the market, IE 5%, Chrome has gained 8% and Safari almost 1%.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201103-201108 ... Or around 19-20% and about 0.1% behind Android.

Browser stats are fun, there are so many to choose from!

I'm not sure it has ever been true that Google had >91% of the search market, but it's certainly not true now. .

Think global, my friend (Google certainly would):
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201008-201108

Which gives 91% market share. Although to be fair, having thought about it for a day, I'm pretty dubious of that figure. Other sites give closer to 85%, which seems more sensible.

It's worse if you allow a competitor (who is also a customer) limit your ability to do business.

Sometimes it's better to ignore bullies. But this is a bully bullying a bully. And this bully, in Korea, is treated as royalty. This bully's bully has the war-making backing and influence of their government. If you think the influence of business over government in the US is bad, you haven't seen what Samsung's influence over Korea is like.

I second that. Korean national pride borders on racism sometimes. You know what happened when KT (Korea Telecom) came out with the Nexus One opening the gates for the first series of really usable (Froyo) Samsung, LG, etc. Android based smartphones? The iOS market collapsed within one year! iOS went from 60% marketshare to just 3-5. In the first three months after the Nexus launch iOS marketshare fell a whopping 40% - in three months!!! People actually sold their iShinys to buy smartphones from Korean manufacturers because they were good enough. Koreans buy Korean products. Check the numbers for yourself.