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."

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you write a true comment in a Flamebaitisticalish way (which you did), you will get modded as such ;)

Dumb statistics

[flyingfsck]

These type of stats always ignore the bulk of Linux devices. There are more than 300 million Linux devices sold every year. The total number of Linux devices outnumbers everything else by a wide margin.

However, it is nice to know that Microsoft still supplies 100% of all Windows systems...

Pulling stats out of thin air

[dedazo]

Hi twitter [slashdot.org].

EEE PC has sold more than 4 million, most of them GNU/Linux

Really? I must admit I didn't know much about this but a little bit of Google reveals this interview [laptopmag.com] with ASUS CEO Jerry Shen, which I think was also reported here on Slashdot (about the return rates for Linux devices, which he seems to invalidate):

I think the return rate for the Eee PCs are low but I believe the Linux and Windows have similar return rates. We really separate the products into different user groups. A lot of users like the Windows XP, but in Europe a lot of people want the Linux option. Actually in Linux we support the Easy Mode and in Q4 of this year we are going to start selling Windows XP with an Easy Mode.

Here's another article where Shen is also quoted about the ratio of XP to Linux EEE units sold, which he says is 60:40:

Shen -- who is keen on Linux -- said Asus had hoped sales of Eee PCs would be 50:50 between XP and Linux, but actually they were 60:40 in XP's favour. (I assume that's for this calendar year.) So far, around 4m have been sold, and the target is 5m for this year.

So obviously you're just making that up. Nothing like bogus facts and words like "laughable" and "undeniable" to get on moderators' good graces, eh?

Re:Measurement

[je ne sais quoi]

As I pointed out when I submitted another story of the same subject yesterday (which for some reason wasn't selected for the front page, I think slashdot needs to wait for something to be old news before it makes the front page): A CNN blog [cnn.com] has a write-up on it that contains some information on how this is measured:

Net Applications' monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to Web sites operated by firm's clients. Although the company describes the results as "market shares," Net Applications does not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense of sales revenue or unit sales. It does, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to measure browser and operating system trends.

I don't know if their clients are U.S. only or Worldwide.

Also in that report, it shows that Firefox use broke 20% for the first time ever at the expense of Internet Explorer.

Re:Yes, Laughable Numbers.

[2nd Post!]

Um, iPhones sold about 11m now, worldwide, which would help push the EEPC effect down.

On top of that, Mac sales are also about 10m, worldwide.

So even if Linux is growing, Mac/iPhone is growing faster.

Re:Monopoloy

[BradleyUffner]

Monopoly isn't all about market share. It is about anti-competitive practices.

Sorry, but this is wrong. A Monopoly has nothing to do with being anti-copetitive, and everything to do with market share. Monopolies them selves are not illegal, the only become illegal when they activly act anti-competitivly. If I invent something new, with nothing at all like it existing, I have a monopoly, a legal monopoly.

in par with that, acting anti-competitively is not illegal if you are not a monopoly, as long as the individual action is not illegal that is.

Re:Monopoloy

[zubikov]

The US antitrust regulators like to go by two metrics: Herfindahl Index (HHI) and Market Concentration Ratio (google them up). HHI = s1^2 + s2^2 + s3^2 + ... + sn^2 (where sn is the market share of the ith firm) If the HHI index is > 1800, this usually means it's a monopoly. Nothing is set in stone, but play around with the numbers and you'll get an idea. Basically Microsoft is still considered a monopoly for a long time.

Correction: Missing URL

[dedazo]

Oh god, I hate replying to myself but I forgot to include the source of the second quote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/oct/08/linux.windows [guardian.co.uk]

Sorry about that.

Re:Monopoloy

[greg1104]

Guess you missed this antitrust lawsuit [informationweek.com] over the iPod?

Re:Monopoloy

[oh_my_080980980]

So speaks an idiot who know nothing of the law.

Microsoft was found guilty NOT because they were a monopoly but because they used their monopoly size to force competitors out of the market and force OEMS into exclusive contracts.

Get a clue.

Re:Will someone please think of the XP users?

[RobertM1968]

Bad upper management decisions doomed CompUSA - such as focusing on advertising printers that had no real profit, instead of advertising their formerly lucrative (and always profitable) Tech Services and Business Services divisions. By the time people in upper management were changed out with people who understood this, the company didnt have the money to fix the problem (though they did come up with very viable plans to do so - just couldnt get the backing at that point).

PCs and Windows sales had nothing to do with it. Do you have any idea how many people didnt even know we repaired PCs? Or that we had a Business Sales and Services department? Or that we offered training on a variety of things?

The above, and no longer catering to the core customers that maintained their profitability were the cause.

I know... I was there.

FLAWED METHODOLOGY

[Computershack]

That's a report about a market share based on the number of connections to a restricted amount of websites that run adverts hosted by Net Apps partners.
Only problem with that is if you run Adblock et al, you'll not show up in the stats. If you don't connect to one of the sites running Net Apps partner adverts, you'll not show up in the stats. If you don't use the internet or use it rarely, you'll not show up in the stats.

This site [wikipedia.org]gives a better view as it aggregates data from several different sources and doesn't just use one that can be excluded by an ad blocker.

Re:Good news

[jellomizer]

90% for windows.
8.9% for Mac
Meaning 1.1% for Linux and other Operating Systems.
It is Mac who is taking MS. Market Share, not Linux... Sorry. Just because we are all group together so it seems like we are a majority the truth is Linux users are in a small minority.

Re:Ha!

[d3ac0n]

Microsoft is a company.

So is Apple.

Do I win a prize? ;)

Re:Yeah but

[stewbacca]

Macs used to have 15% to 20% marketshare in the early 1990's. Now they have less than 10%, when they had the Mac Clones they really sold a lot of them. If Apple allowed Mac Clones again, I am sure Macs could easily capture that 20% all over again.

Revisionist history! I hade a couple Apple clones (out of morbid curiousity, and they both sucked). MacOS market share at that time was at an all-time low and the clone market nearly killed the company. Steve Jobs came back, killed the clones, introduced the hockey-puck moused iMac, and that recovery is now legendary, despite the worst mouse ever created.

Re:And Apple is near thier peak of marketshare

[stewbacca]

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.

As Apple market share increases, don't you think they'd increase their capacity to make and deliver more systems? Do I even need to ask this question?

Re:Monopoloy

[chaim79]

Amazon got DRM free for two reasons:

• They caved to the Music Companies demands for variable pricing (iTunes refuses to price on 'demand' but leave everything at 99c)
• Music companies don't like iTunes dominance in the market, they tried giving Amazon DRM Free music to try and make it more attractive then iTunes

There might have also been demands that Apple force the sale of Albums (vs single tracks) at the Music Companies whim, but I'm not sure if that was part of this or other negotiations...

Re:Ha!

[TheRaven64]

OTOH, MacOS has been around since 7 years before the first line of the Linux kernel was ever written

Mac OS X shares almost nothing in common with MacOS classic, other than containing a virtualised copy that never made the switch to Intel. Mac OS X is a linear descendent of NeXTSTEP, via OPENSTEP. The first release of NeXTSTEP was 1989, only two years before Linux 0.1, although there were previews available from around 1986. If we're comparing kernels to kernels, then it would be fair to include BSD and Mach on the OS X side, which date from earlier. If we're comparing windowing systems, X has been around longer than Display Postscript (which was replaced by Quartz in OS X), and many X servers in the '90s included the X Display Postscript extension.

Re:Good news

[sdpuppy]

90% for windows. 8.9% for Mac Meaning 1.1% for Linux and other Operating Systems.

ominous voice : There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of... oh forget that.

Oh man, just RTFA's links:

Percent for Jan Aug Nov

Windows 91.50 90.66 89.62

Mac 7.57 7.86 8.87

Linux 0.64 0.93 0.83

iPhone 0.13 0.30 0.37

Playstation 0.03 0.04 0.04

FreeBSD 0.00 0.00 0.01

Other 0.13 0.21 0.26

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9 [hitslink.com]

Re:BSD is dead

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If you mean that OSX is a descendant of FreeBSD then you are mistaken.

OS X uses a Mach Kernel, but OS X and FreeBSD OSs include more than a kernel. Much of the OS X userspace is derived from FreeBSD and as such one can claim OS X a a descendent of NextStep (Mach), FreeBSD, and the original MacOS.

Re:BSD is dead

[TheUser0x58]

You are mistaken. OS X's kernel is a hybrid of Mach and FreeBSD (uses FreeBSD's VFS, processes, sockets, etc), with some significant additions developed by Apple as well. Also much of OS X's POSIX-y userland is FreeBSD-derived.

Re:BSD is dead

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Nah, that would just be stuff they both inherited from their common ancestor.

That just isn't so. Next integrated parts of both FreeBSD and OpenBSD into NextStep, which in turn was pulled into OS X, but Apple also pulled in additional parts of the FreeBSD userspace in the creation of OS X. Heck, they still are doing so as the latest release version (Leopard) pulled in some of the ACL architecture from the TrustedBSD project of FreeBSD. OS X is clearly a direct descendent of FreeBSD via multiple paths.