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Windows Drops Below 90% Market Share
ozmanjusri writes "Online market share of the dominant Windows operating system has taken its biggest monthly fall in years to drop below 90%, according to Net Applications Inc. Computerworld reports that Microsoft's flagship product has been steadily losing ground to Mac OS X and Linux, and is at its lowest ebb in the market since 1995. 'Mac OS X... [ended] the month at 8.9%. November was the third month running that Apple's operating system remained above 8%.' The stats show that while some customers are 'upgrading' from XP to Vista, many are jumping ship to Apple, while Linux is also steadily gaining ground. A Net Applications executive suggests the slide may be caused by many of the same factors that caused the fall in Internet Explorer use. 'The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up,' he said. November has more weekend days, as well Thanksgiving in the US, a result that emphasizes the importance of corporate sales to Microsoft."
And I get modded flamebait for pointing out earlier today that Apple is gaining market share? It's true. Apple is gaining ground. Of course, it probably doesn't help MS that Vista isn't exactly setting the world on fire.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just curious, but at what point is Microsoft no longer considered a monopoloy? At what percentage are they legally allowed to start pulling the dirty tricks again?
> Linux seems to have completely failed to capitalize on Vistas unpopularity,
> still having less than 1% market share.
Patience. The netbook appears to be the crack that the penguin has been waiting for. If I had told you three years ago that I forsaw Linux being sold in Target and ToysRUs you would have laughed. Honestly, I would laughed too because I didn't see it coming either. But seeing is believing.
To date we have faced a chicken and the egg problem. Nobody wanted to try selling Linux because nobody had ever succeeded selling Linux. Everybody believed that (Mac excepted, those people are just wierd) all PCs were Windows sales, largely because Microsoft would brutally punish any OEM who didn't agree. All that is now changed. We now know that Linux can be successfully sold in retail environments when correctly executed. ASUS reports return rates sililar to Windows while Acer's less polished implementation was a disaster, thus the correct lesson will be learned; do it right and it sells.
And just wait for the pricepoints on netbooks to shift even lower. Microsoft will either be forced to abandon the segment (fatal) or slash prices to levels that will have Wall Street analysts howling for blood.
Once everyone has completed the mental adjustment to retail Linux as a done deal the whole industry will have to take a long hard look at one of the (if not THE) most expensive components in a lower end PC. If ordinary people will buy an EEE or a Dell Mini 9 with Linux, would they buy a low end desktop (of the sort that won't play current FPS games anyway) if the level of integration were similar? Expect to find out the answer to that question over the next year or two. Will Crossover/Transgaming have a part to play in the final solution? Looking at how Parallels, VMWare and/or Crossover Mac are on display anywhere Mac software is sold I'd put my money on yes.
Democrat delenda est
Apple will NEVER get more than maybe 10% of the market. The company doesn't scale well. And they tie OSX to their hardware.
Let's say Apple releases Snow Leopard. It's the greatest OS known to man. it's 50% faster than 10.5, runs ALL Windows applications faster than Windows, has ZFS as the filesystem, and has zero security flaws.
Ok, great, let's run it. But I have to buy a machine from Apple. Now if I just want a machine, I can get one. But Apple has enough problems with releasing new systems with their 8% share now. What happens when this goes to 20%? 30%? They are bottlenecked by the number of systems they can produce. They physically can't get the number of systems out there to get any real marketshare. Is OSX better than Vista? No arguments here. But what already has more share? When you have one company releasing something, and everyone else releasing something else, Windows will win every time. It doesn't matter how great OSX is, or how shitty Windows is. Which this is something most people figured out ages ago. Except for the Apple people, who somehow think OSX can take over the world.
Now if they licensed OSX, and then you have Dell, HP, et.al. selling them, it's another thing. But Jobs will never do this, so talking about it is a moot point.
> But they're not. They're putting bigger screens, keyboards, and drives in them.
Because for most of the year an EEE PC on a shelf was about as rare as a Wii. So if you can sell every box you can ship the decision of which to make more of is a simple one. The one with the best profit. That was the 900 series. But ASUS is promising to finally hit their original $200 MSRP next year. And if they don't there are countless generic Chinese houses with products entering the channels and some of those don't even have an x86 compatible CPU so Windows isn't really an option.
When the latest ARM chips finally make it into actual products the whole game is likely to be changed yet again. Imagine a two pound netbook with 10+ hours of battery life with enough DSP grunt to be able to do Flash, YouTube and mpeg4 playback. And it just might be able to run compiz. That will change everything. The great weakness that to date nobody has been able to exploit with Windows is the fact they killed off all their ports and have tied their fortunes to the fate of x86. No x86 on a development map gets near the 1W under load power consumption mark and the notion of idle power in the single digit milliwatt range is fantasy. ARM is already there.
So be patient, those netbooks in blister packs hanging as impulse purchases are the future. And Windows isn't likely to be a part of that future.
Democrat delenda est
Unfortunately yes. I know a lot of windows users that use that IE tab or whatever it's called in Firefox. When I have mentioned a site being shit because it doesn't work in firefox, they say "yes it does" and tell me to get this IE tab thing. Then look confused when I tell them it doesn't work on Linux.
And these people are developers. Shitty ones that can only target IE, but employed developers nonetheless.
I don't therefore I'm not.