Study Claims Windows Usage Market Share Could Soon Fall Below 90%

By Christian Zibreg
published

Chicago (IL) - A new study released by Net Applications indicates that a decreasing percentage of the Internet population is using Windows as their operating system. It appears that Mac OS X could soon be listed in the double digit-range, while Windows could fall below the 90% mark.

Net Applications’ most recent operating system survey is pointing to continued market share gains of Mac OS X at the expense of Windows, echoing similar figures in a recently published browser market share survey. The research firm measures market share by recording which operating systems are used to browse a set of hand-picked web sites that are described to be representative for the overall market - which means that the Net Applications survey does not provide precise market share figures in terms of sales or unit shipments, but provide trends in terms of usage. According to the research firm, the data is collected from a base of "approximately 160 million visitors per month."

The survey lists Apple’s Mac OS X operating system market share in June with a record 7.94%, which is a 0.11 point increase over the previous month. This figure makes OS X the best-selling UNIX variant ever with the largest overall share of the market. Linux currently stands at 0.80% market share in this survey, a slight improvement over the 0.68% recorded last month. Windows machines still dominate the market and came in at 90.89%, down from 91.13 percent in the month ago. Although the lead of Windows remains unquestioned, its share has been dropping slowly but steadily over the past two years.

At the current pace, Windows could drop below the 90% in the fourth quarter of this year.

Apple’s iPhone OS X variant held steady at 0.16% market share in June. "Apple has confirmed that its online inventories for the original version of the iPhone are sold out in the US and UK," Net Applications said. "Apple appears to be clearing out its inventories in preparation for the iPhone 2.0 release. This, in conjunction with customers holding off purchasing until 2.0 is released has temporarily leveled off the iPhone usage share."

Christian Zibreg
18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Pei-chen
    I'm going to ignore the fact that Net Applications maybe an Apple marketing firm and ask a dumb question. Consider most Mac can also boot windows, shouldn't windows' share actually be higher?
    Reply
  • Lozil
    Ya after that buggy Vista, and Discontinuing XP, They can expect a major fall in coming months...
    Mac OS is less Resource heavy and works like a charm... Only problem is Apple is a Bit Too pricey....

    http://free-and-useful.blogspot.com
    Reply
  • diabloazul126
    Ya after that buggy Vista, and Discontinuing XP, They can expect a major fall in coming months...

    I fail to see how Vista is buggy. I haven't had a single problem with x64 Home Premium.

    Sure the OS is lackluster, but buggy -- not so much. It's about as buggy as XP was after a year or two on the market.
    Reply
  • layzer253
    Mac os uses less resources eh...? You MUST be talking about 10.2/2 era sir
    Reply
  • cosmeister
    This study is flawed in so many ways it is not funny.

    First, who decided what sites were representative? For instance, if apple.com were there, then one would assume a lot of hits for apple machines. There are a lot of popular sites I do not use.

    Second, did they merely check the OS or did they somehow identify hits per computer per OS? Maybe a small number of machines hit those sites often.

    And third, and most damning, is the assumption that all machines will browse the web at all. Remember a lot of PCs are used as servers, or office workhorses that may never see a website. Whereas most Macs are home computers that most definately will.

    So the results of that test would be skewed in favor of Macs in my opinion. If they want to do a better survey they should send one to individuals and companies asking the number and types of machines at the location and make the location selection completely random.
    Reply
  • geckoar
    Yeah I have been running vista for over a year now. And its great I'm not going back to XP. My parents have more problems on their XP PC than I have on Vista. So vista is a RAM Hog... go get 4gb of ram for $70 and your good to go. I'm running a Phenom CPU, HD 3870(Which hypermemories up to 2.3gb of video RAM.) and 4gb of DDR2 800 RAM. The problem with Vista is not the OS it's the people who think that it will run of with their 4 year old PC that could just run XP.
    Reply
  • shadowthor
    Interestingly, if the market share of Apple just goes up, they will start getting a taste of virus, trojans, and what not as more hackers decide to target them because of market share. I agree, Vista is running a heck of a lot better than my XP comp, been okay so far. Like above post, it just eats a lot of ram.
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    Does this take into account mobile phone / PDA access? Also, if this is not based on unique machines (i.e. not multiple hits from the same machine), then the results are useless. Maybe people of one OS visit the certain sites more frequently than other OS'. People with mobile / PDA internet probably visit far less sites than PC users.
    Reply
  • Windows will NOT fall below 90%. As stated with many above, many PCs are servers. Hello - I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 since week two, I have had NO crashes thus far.
    Reply
  • Vista Ultimate x64 runs great! 8GiB
    Reply