Vista Taking a Nibble Out of Apple in OS Wars?

PetManimal writes "Despite all of the positive buzz about the Mac operating system and the 'halo effect' of iPod sales, Mac OS X market share actually dropped last month, reports Computerworld: 'The share of PowerPC-based Macs fell ... from 4.29% in February to 3.94% in March. That dip was not fully offset by an increase in Intel-based Mac hardware, leading to a overall net decline in Mac share of 0.3%, to 6.08% in March.' Meanwhile, Vista is rising, the article says, with just over 2% of computers connected to the Internet using the new Windows OS. The figures are from a company called Net Applications, which collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of 40,000+ Web sites."

Comments

Re:Which websites?

[Pensacola Tiger]

Which websites? Offhand I'd say:

msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista

www.answers.com/topic/microsoft-windows

support.microsoft.com

www.annoyances.org

www.windowssecrets.com

technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista

You get the idea...

Re:Oh brother...

[DogDude]

People are waiting to buy the latest Service Pack from Apple, so they're not using their computers? Huh?

How they did it.

[twitter]

The other option is that their websites mainly attract Windows users. It could be something to do with them being served off IIS, using activeX so they only work with the latest IE on Windows and blinking signs that say, "This Web Site is Optimized for Vista." I know it's hard to find sites so poorly run even in the wintel press, but anything can happen when you "get the facts".

Re:pfft

[Fordiman]

Wow. You just condemned the entire industrial design industry as either 'artsy' or 'faggoty'. And I'm not just talking about the people who fill your world with pretty. What about the people who design furniture? Or glassware? Packaging? Advertising?

Almost everything you touch has been designed in some way, and chances are, it was done on a Mac.

Of course, I'm sure you'd like all things to look as they did in the 1950's: rough, matted, somewhat childish.

The Mac is an operating system designed and optimized for people who are willing to give up a little bit of low-level control for the sake of stability and simplicity. It's not for everyone, and certainly not myself, but it has its niche.

Of course, the Zealots don't really understand that it's not exactly a developer-friendly or office-friendly OS - and as a result, they never shut up about it. It may be that they've bought into the marketing-speak surrounding OS-X. That's fine; people are entitled to their stupid, stupid opinions.

Linux is the only OS that can be tailored to any user, but that tailoring takes work that most users aren't willing to put in. Oh well on that. Give it time, as always. Some distros are just about desktop-ready at the moment, in that they're more than accepatbly usable with a modest learning curve for just about anyone.

Windows - well, I dunno. I use it, mostly because I have one device that I can't get working in Linux (my XROM cart). I *could* buy one of the nice multimode carts that use SD and not need any drivers at all, but they cost money, and the XROM still works well.