The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Windows 7 soars while Mac OS X trips online

Down, the new up for Apple

Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software

Windows 7 saw healthy growth in web-tracked usage in its first full month of release while Mac OS X found itself moving in a direction Cupertino is not used to: downward.

The web-watchers at NetApplications report that when tracked on a daily basis, Windows 7 now accounts for five per cent of operating systems using the web. Averaged over the month of November, four per cent of web traffic went to machines running Windows 7.

Web market share for Windows 7, Mac OS X, and Linux

Any bets on where those trend lines will be at the end of the year?

To be sure, Apple's slippage is far from monumental - Mac OS X dropped from 5.27 per cent in October to 5.12 per cent in November among operating systems that NetApplications tracked on the web. But Apple's operating system has seen its market share creeping upward relatively consistently since its surge late last year.

Windows 7's gains appear to be coming at the expense of Windows XP, and not Windows Vista, which dipped only slightly. Month-on-month, Windows XP sank 1.43 per cent to 69.05 while Vista slipped a mere 0.28 per cent to 18.55.

Those figures indicate that Windows 7 isn't stealing Vista's market share simply because Vista didn't have much to begin with.

Linux, by the way, still hovers around one per cent, as it has all year. The few, the proud, the penguins.

Among browsers, Internet Explorer sank to a new low of 63.62 per cent, while Firefox reached a new high of 24.72 per cent. Google's Chrome has seen a sharp increase in 2009 - its 1.52 per cent presence in January grew handsomely by November to 3.93.

Apple's Safari sank gently along with Mac OS X in November, down to 4.36 per cent from October's 4.42.

Still, one analyst has good news for Mac fans. In a discussion of Apple's recent performance, Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co points out: "Today, Apple gets one out every ten dollars spent on home computers worldwide. In the US, its dollar share is more than one in five."

Apple's market share may be stalling at around five per cent, but its popularity in the home and its high margins are using that five per cent to keep it and its shareholders fat and happy. ®

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Big Mac

""Today, Apple gets one out every ten dollars spent on home computers worldwide."

Given their market-share in terms of numbers of units contra the above it says something about Mac's prices, hmmm?

10
1

Poor Predictions

" I predict 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop."

How did you come to that conclusion!? I think you mean 3013.

8
0

Hey Rik - do you know any thing about statistics??

"while Mac OS X found itself moving in a direction Cupertino is not used to: downward"

Excuse me but the change over the last few months is similar to the NOISE that one sees between Jan and June 2008. Give me longer time scales and bigger changes!

8
0

More from The Register

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
Plus: Now officially OK to admit you never used STL algorithms
Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover
Hey Ive, Ive... add more unicorns, willya?
Apple: iOS7 dayglo Barbie makeover is UNFINISHED - report
Plus: You don't like the icons? Blame marketing
Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7
So long, Oracle! Don't let the door hit you on the way out
Shy? Socially inadequate? Fiddling with your phone could help
App 'tells the brutal truth' about social inadequates' chatup lines
Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps
New release arrives with GlassFish, NetBeans support
 breaking news
'Office Facebook' firm Tibbr wants you to PAY for mobe-meetings app
Great idea. Punters won't cough for it though
 breaking news
The only Waze is Google: Ad giant tipped to gobble map app 'for $1.3bn'
Pac-Man-satnav-ish upstart in bidding war with Apple, Facebook
 breaking news
PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)
IT education musings to G8 chiefs to mystify IT industry