Windows 7, Mac OS make gains in January
January was a good month for both the emerging Windows 7 and the venerable Mac OS, according to Web metrics company Net Applications.
The Mac OS is now hovering around the 10 percent mark among operating systems accessing the Web.
In its Operating System Market Share report for January, Net Applications showed the Mac OS at 9.93 percent, up from 9.63 percent in December. The iPhone also trended upward to 0.48 percent in January, from 0.44 percent in December.
January figures from Net Applications on operating system share amid Internet use.
(Credit: Net Applications)In its recap of the Net Applications numbers, Fortune highlighted the ground gained by Apple's iPod Touch:
The biggest winner in January, however, was the iPod touch, whose "explosive" growth in December continued unabated after the holidays, growing 37.5% to reach a 0.11% Internet share...That means that more than one out of every 1,000 Web hits in January were made from iPod touches -- at least according to Net Applications' data.
Use of Windows 7, meanwhile, surged in January after Microsoft released the public beta of the operating system, the follow-on to Windows Vista that's due sometime around the end of 2009.
The beta became available January 10 (though not without some stumbling), up to which point Windows 7 stood at about 0.04 percent. Through most of the rest of the month, it fluctuated at between roughly 0.12 percent and 0.15 percent. It closed out the month with a jump to 0.23 percent on January 31, according to Net Applications' breakout on Windows 7.
(Credit:
Net Applications)
That January 31 jump may have come from people who still thought that would be the last day to get the beta. But about a week ago, Microsoft extended the window for the downloads, saying the Windows 7 beta is available through February 10.
But on the whole, Windows continued to inch downward. The Net Applications report for January, released Sunday, put the Microsoft operating system at 88.26 percent, down from 88.68 percent in December. That's still plenty good enough, of course, to keep Windows in the No. 1 spot. Linux came in third at 0.83 percent in January, essentially the same as its 0.85 percent December showing.
Net Applications accumulates its data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted Web sites that collect statistics.
Jonathan Skillings is managing editor of CNET News, based in the Boston bureau. He's been with CNET since 2000, after a decade in tech journalism at the IDG News Service, PC Week, and an AS/400 magazine. He's also been a soldier and a schoolteacher. E-mail Jon. 
there's not even a hint of news on snow leopard
it's almost like it never existed
Apple has been overly secretive about it
wonder where you got that info from ?
And BTW, it's BETA fool. (both)
You know why?
And Apple has a bigger task at hand - getting rid of PPC code.
MS only has to get rid of all it's code and the stink that's Vista.
Apple is growing and is still a deal - $129 or $199 for a family 5-pack.
Apple will continue to gain ground.
Open source is the future.
Even if Win 7 is good, it's not going to grow Windows users of faith in MS.
Apple is growing because people are tired of MS pulling crap out of its ass and selling it as a new OS. With the amount of progress being made with Linux at such a quick pace, Windows 7 needs to be more than just solid, it needs to reconvert those who've left.
Please post the links to these "early previews" please.
But jokes and bad semantics aside, Windows is probably not going anywhere in the immediate time frame. It's settled in at about 85% and will stay there, much to the dismay of Balmer, because the PC market is saturated. As for mobile and the living room, it will likely stay where it is there as well, which is pretty negligible. But that's the fast growing market. MSFTs glory days are over and with Zunes and XBox 360, it's now pretty clear that they can't make inroads without leveraging from an existing monopoly, and the PC doesn't seem to have much power to leverage into mobile platforms, at least not the way Balmer's playing the game. He can jump around on stage all afternoon grossing out the audience with sweaty underarms and whooping like a monkey, but the new generation of users aren't as fixated on the PCDesktop as the prior generation was.
Jobs played this one right in spite of the naysayers at the launch of the iPod and iTunes. Add iPhone to the triumvirate and Apple has a pretty good shot at launching into the living room with AppleTV. They're playing it humble pie with the AppleTV, but once you've seen what it can do, it's hard to go back, although gaming purists obviously like the PlayStation 3 and even the XBox 360 as game machines with media playback capabilities over the AppleTV.
Good for apple, I'm pretty sure that my next laptop will be a Mac (first mac ever!)
Run a VM if you need XP - we know you're not going to run Vista.
Have fun and enjoy it.
I doubt that Windows 7 will really stop this trend, or even slow it down. While Windows 7 does address many of the concerns that Vista brought up, it is still more memory-intensive than XP, and still different enough from XP to make a lot of users decide to decline it as well... especially once folks realize that it looks and smells just like Vista. After all, if you're going to have to change how you use an OS anyway, most folks will (barring OEM forcing) start to shop around and start weighing benefits vs. cost. With the Windows 7 UI looking just like a modified KDE interface, the jump to Linux will be perceptually far easier to do later on down the road.
Also, OSX is getting large enough, and is still growing fast enough, to start making an even larger impact on opinion, and on market dynamics in general. No longer can app makers ignore OSX (just like server app/service makers cannot afford to ignore Linux, where its market share is still huge).
Does this mean Microsoft is in trouble? On a small scale, yes. But it is more akin to the freshening breeze before the storm, as opposed to a full-blown sudden tornado.
/P
Until Macs are available in Walmart, then they will continue to be a luxury good item. In recession times like this, luxury goods usually see an uptike. It's been this way for decades and nothing currently happening is indicating any sort of change in that trend.
It should also be noted that while you have in the past stated publically that you did not own, use, or support any Microsoft products and were gladly parading thatfact around, not less than three weeks ago you were going on about how much you liked the XP 64 installation you have on a machine. Either you had been dishonest in your prior comments (possible based on your history), had been making the entire thing up about having this XP 64 bit machine (again, very possible based on past history), or you have indeed set up another machine for usage in which case you yourself have skewed the statistics as well by adding another OS to your mix without removing one from another column.
It all goes to show one person can really not be a good idicator. These statistics are interesting, but meaningless as they are incomplete. Note that they include the iphone as an OS, but do not include Blackberrry or Palm or Nokia. Nokia still blows away the iPhone for market usage, and yet they don't list it in the study. It's very much a pick and choose situation and when you do that, you're going to skew the data.
In order to be objective, you can't play favorites and it's clear this author is doing that very thing.
The desktop as the main hub of the workday is over for many business workers. Windows is simply too bloated to run effectively on small devices in its current form. Without yet another major overhaul to the Windows system (getting rid of the registry) it can't move over effectively.
He's not playing favorites, he's just stating facts. While yes you are right that public opinion will be ultimately determined after release, there are undeniably many things which will still be apparent, which I had pointed out. Your resorting to ad hominem and complete avoidance of what I had actually wrote up there is a strong indicator that you cannot disagree with what I had written.
BTW, you got your facts all screwed. I installed Vista Business x64 on my laptop @ work for compatibility testing, and had to double the RAM to 4GB (and strip half the services) just to get it workable. It's a Core Duo T-8800 series processor. At home (note the distinction), I use OSX and Linux exclusively.
About your mention of mobile usage? I have a Blackberry Curve - it is pretty much useless for web browsing outside of Google Maps + GPS. Little wonder the damned thing doesn't have enough usage to get out of the "other" column. Nokia uses a combination of OSes - namely, Symbian, Linux, and Windows Mobile, depending on model. IOW, it's split, but it's in there.
"Until Macs are available in Walmart, then they will continue to be a luxury good item. "
Most Dells are sold through dell.com. Apples are also sold through apple.com. In other words, given the ubiquity of the Internet and the ease with which anyone can use a web browser, *** are you talking about?
the reason Blackberry,Nokia Os's etc r not included is because
they don't have a meaningful share
even WinMo is a distant 2nd in the mobile os space
last I checked it was .04% or something like that
Even though the IPhone is outnumberd many times over
by other phones it still has a higher no. of web hits,
showing us that other phones suck
when it comes to internet browsing
Wonder wat happened to all the Iphone killers like the G1 etc.
You idiots crack me up!
You cannot refute the facts (anecdotal or not), you cannot refute the analysis, so you resort to schoolyard chanting and sheer denial to avoid any responsibility for doing either.
Tell you what - you kids name the site, I'll happily post the 'Control Panel > System' screenshot. Dan knows how to get hold of me.
When someone has virtually the entire market the only way is down. Apple's gains are, however, minute. There is no sea change and no tipping point and they remain a luxury item used by a minority. Those are the facts. Application manufacturers will continue to treat Macs and Linux as afterthoughts whilst they concentrate on where they money and market is which is, of course, Windows.
Now things might change if Apple offer OS X to third party OEMS but do you you really think that's going to happen? I doubt it. As for your comments about 'changes', I doubt very much they will bother most people.
Beat THAT!!
We get it. Because you have more OS's than the other guy, that must mean you have a giant *****, right? Of course, you could just be trying to make up for a "shortcoming".
...and I seriously doubt that my little setup is anywhere near big enough to be called "average", let alone the biggest. I also get paid a lot more than $60k/year to keep it all fed and cared for. :)
So, err, when you kids are done bragging about who has what, let me know, mm'kay?
/P
Ah, But its not on one computer now is it. Its on a server farm. I am just giving you a hard time :)
Now for the big stuff, you'd have to go to places like a government lab or (ferinstance) Intel's HPC farms.
Big. Freaking. Deal.
So what? It doesn't mean anything and neither do the rigs that anyone else is spewing over.
Anyone worth anything in IT uses their systems as *tools* and uses the right tool for the job whatever that job may be. No one wants to be the guy that thinks every problem is a nail.
Anyway, computers are boring. The excitement comes from what you do with them.
> it will be a buggy mess in comparison
Both Apple and Microsoft are trying to accomplish the same thing with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 respectively. Instead of releasing a lot of new features, both aim to refine what they already have. Apple has been more explicit about this, but even Microsoft has admit that "Windows 7 will be like Vista, only better". Both operating systems will be a more solid, less buggy release than the previous versions. The only difference is that Apple has a much stronger starting code base to work with. Over time, Apple's advantage over Microsoft will only increase. Unless of course, Microsoft bites the bullet, and does what Apple did when moving to OS X.
It would have been had they used the entire of the FreeBSD core OS and kernel instead of cherry picking it and hacking it on top of an OPENSTEP kernel, however, they didn't and therefore they have a big hacked up mess which kinda works, but just don't expect too much from it.
That is why you will find that the FreeBSD snapshot in Leopard is quite old and inherently insecure, because they rarely update it, quite possibly because Apple's so called engineers are incompetent. Lets face it, they **** up every update that they release...
Leopard 10.5 was a mess, it's on 10.5.6 now and still some things don't work properly. It's crap if you actually want a productive OS. I had loads of problems with OS X 10.5 and also with XP, but yet with Vista, I have had zero problems. Snow Leopard will be a bigger mess, because Apple are so closed and not enough people test the product. You have to remember, they are making some major architectural changes, so they are absolutely bound to **** them up. By 10.6.5 Snow Leopard might just be usable. :-)
Microsoft is evolving NT, in fact, they started it several years ago when they released XP x64 edition. It's a completely different architecture from the 32 bit versions, it is more reliable and more secure and a lot of the legacy code is gone.
Anyone whining about Windows should try a 64 bit version on some decent hardware, it is a much more stable OS.
The thing that is stopping Microsoft taking all of it's 32 bit OS's off the market is that people demand backwards compatibility with their sodding 16 bit apps, which should be long dead.
The fact that Windows is so popular is also it's stumbling block, because when MS have tried to make changes, people complain because they don't like change.
They can't win really can they?
So sad, really.
At this exact moment, I'm connected to facebook, myspace, yahoomail, photobucket, flickr, youtube, twitter, digg and am checking all RSS feeds I've subscribed to while downloading new vids to watch and being connected to AIM and MSN. I also can sync my email from my OS to another device and I can work with .doc files, meaning I can use an office suite. I could do these same things on a netbook and I'm fairly certain that these same tasks are available on any other device my OS has been installed on. Besides, it's not exactly necessary to install a specialized version since my OS is so much less bloated than Windows, the other versions are just optimized to make full use of the device.
My OS of choice? Ubuntu Linux.
It's called sarcasm. And yes it's sad that the entire Linux market share is comparible to that of a single phone. Oh, sorry -- almost double I mean. My bad.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying Lunux is bad. I'm just saying it isn't dominating like some people (trolls) say it is. Also don't assume that I'm saying anything about Windows here because I'm not.
1. Microsoft's total volume didn't go up as much as it has been, wow, big surprise. But it's still the big Kahuna.
2. iPhone -- hey welcome to the party, looks like there's really something there.
3. Win 7 -- wow, what a start! Hit 10% of the iPhone's penetration in a month as a geekfest beta.
4. Linux - dude, you're toast! You've been around forever, your trend line is going nowhere! You're losing share in the same order of magnitude as Windows, but since your share is tiny, that decrease is a real percentage.
5. Mac OS X - everybody loves a good #2. It makes everybody better.
6. Playstation - you got a playstation to play games. Duh!
Linux is used on so many devices, it's impossible to know the real numbers. It's also used to run varying VM instances of other OS's for testing purposes as well as others. With all data taken into account, especially if somehow all the data necessary to make these kinds of judgements were gathered, the actual numbers would be vastly different.
It went up in a negative trajectory, as the folks at NASA like to say... ;)
Let's jump linux 50% more to be fair. Wow 1.25% of the market share! OK I'll do 100% more, 1.66% of the market share! Yea don't deluted yourself that linux has any market share. I've used linux for 20 years and it's never been big. It's ultimately too hard for the 'average' person to use as it has been for its' entire life. It's much better these days then years ago but at the rate it takes linux won't gain any 'real' market share for another 15-20 years. Sure it might run ATM's, Web servers, be on a lot of geeks personal pc's, be on some select handheld devices, and some other stuff but in the grand scope of things they are a drop in the bucket. Linux is a soild #3 or #4 OS now like it was 20 years ago and will be 15-20 years from now. There's absolutly nothing wrong with that except you just have to accept it.
The reason Apple is being secretive about it is because they don't want to screw it up like they did with Leopard.
With Apple market share growing, it is only a matter of time until Apple takes over the industry.
Wow, you really are a sad little man.
Pathetic of you to personally attack me as I am reporting you (personal attacks is prohibited).
BTW, at least I use my real name and don't hide behind a fake username.
Grow up, kid -- in 15 years, you will see Apple take over the industry and leave Windows in its wake.
Apple needs to learn that the world is not full of customers that make 100k a year!
and Oh "HEY APPLE" do you know the meaning of the word "Recession"
I agree 100% with you on Apple's greed in terms of price!
In the beginning, I thought it was Apple just trying to earn enough revenue to gain market share -- that was fine.
But now, I realize that they produce products NOT for consumers, but for shareholders.
It's about the value of their stock!
First it started with iTunes and online purchases -- that was fine.
Then the audacity of making iTunes purchases available on the iPhone/iPod Touch wireless sounded more like compulsive shopping (which I never do).
Next, they release iLife '09 where one of their signature features, the ability to learn to play an instrument requires paying for it -- ah, yet another "service" to pay for.
Then as a part of iWork '09, a feature to share documents (it's in (free) beta now, but will be a subscription service in the future).
Then the new 17" Macbook Pro that has an integrated battery that will not survive the maximum 5 year life span -- requires another purchase within 5 years (most likely less).
This is the strategy of the iPods (no user-replaceable battery), you will have to replace it eventually.
With Apple and their sky high prices, I am cautious about their business practices.
As a consumer, Apple does make superior computers to PCs and Windows.
But Windows is a threat in itself (much more so than Apples OS X).
As a consumer, we have to weigh the PROS and the CONS and decide for ourselves which one is the better value.
In a recession, Apple just doesn't quite understand, but yet they manage to keep the crowds shopping in their retail stores.
I purchased my iPod Touch and all accessories at Best Buy (better prices).
I purchase my Macs online (much better deals).
The only reason to visit an Apple retail store is to try out the Mac and attend the free workshops -- that's it.
You can't really draw any comparisons in Stability anymore. Both Mac and Windows OS's are stable and reliable. Maybe back in 1997 you could, but not now.
Personally, I think it comes down to usability. I don't find OSX to be very usable in any form. Networking on the thing is tedious, and I can't stand Finder or the Dock. I consider Windows Explorer (albeit the *one* buggy thing I've found in Vista) to be superior for everyday working, and I'd rather have my taskbar at the bottom along with my RocketDock (far better and more customizable than OSX Dock) at the top of my screen. Best of both worlds.
It's really about WHAT YOU'RE USED TO, not which is really better. I'll never own a new Mac though, simply because the inflated price point is not worth the pretty OS. Especially when I can build just as powerful of a machine for much less, with better hardware (Core i7, tweakable motherboard, any Video card I like, etc). Macs are trendy and cool-looking. So are Hummers. If you want to spend more money on a Mac, that's your prerogative. However, trying to make PC users feel like they're somehow inferior is just fantasy. There's nothing wrong with Windows, and there's nothing wrong with a PC (which can obviously run more than just Windows). As far as security, maybe Linux (not OSX) is more secure, but it's not really a fair comparison when Linux/Mac machines are not really being targeted by malware.
As far as Linux goes, I love my Ubuntu, but it's more like a curiosity. OS's like Ubuntu will NEVER gain market share when something as simple as installing the Flash Player so you can watch a YouTube video involves a lengthy complex process, compared to following a link and clicking a button on Windows. Linux HAS to become "Grandma friendly" if it's ever going to be used by the general public en-masse. Linux user-forums aren't much help either. They all assume you should know what "sudo" is and how to use apt-get or they don't help you. Linux needs to become a true "point and click" OS. Linux geeks don't seem to get that.
Vista haters: PLEASE do some actual research on Superfetch before erroneously stating that Vista is a memory hog. You CANNOT just look at task manager, and assume from there that it's using all your RAM. Vista prefetches RAM for applications. The REAL test is to open up a huge number of APPS and see how the machine performs with them all running. Vista will outperform XP in this manner. First thing I did when I got Vista was to open up all my browsers (8), the entire Adobe CS3 Master Collection (15 large apps), all the Office apps, Open Office, etc, then went back into Photoshop to see how it performed. In XP, having half of those apps open caused Photoshop to be pretty much unusable.
Vista SP1 fixed pretty much all of the REAL Vista problems. Win7 is great, I'm running it on Virtual Box, but I'm hoping they didn't change Vista too much. I see it as mostly PR to convince people they are replacing Vista, when the changes might be mostly cosmetic (which would be a good thing).
It's not until you get to the more complex necessities of the power users that one becomes more difficult than the other, for the most part. Each OS has its own quirks to get used to and to find workarounds for. For example, the first time a power user went to press ctrl, alt, del he would be lost. The grandmas wouldn't have pressed that button combo in the first place. Actually, for the most part, grandmas wouldn't press any button combo. They'd use the GUI which is very simple to learn.
I've used Vista, I looked through some photographs using the built-in photo viewer and immediately had problems navigating the photos. Not because the GUI was difficult but because the photos disappeared. I tried looking through them, got to a certain point and there just wasn't anything there. There was no error message, no indication it was loading, no indication that there was anything prior, I just lost all ability to navigate photos. That's not something a grandma would be able to cope with. This happened with a fully updated version of Windows Vista on a very new, fairly high-end laptop.
When it worked, it was fairly nice, but when it didn't it was frustrating. If it had been my own machine I would have tried to reproduce it, find out exactly what it was doing and why it was doing it and most likely replace the program giving me problems. That's out of the scope of most grandmas I know.
Ubuntu has its quirks, but for what grandmas would use their computers for, it's set up well and it's easy enough to learn there would be close to zero problems learning it.
thats new one
looks like MS fanboys r getting desperate
Wow, someone posting on here with a brain.
I actually agree with everything you say there.
I bought a Mac Pro in Aug 2007 and used OS X until Feb 2008 then put Vista x64 on it. I've never looked back, in terms of performance, reliability and usability, Vista wins hands down. I had many a problem with Leopard when that came out, but no problems at all with Vista x64. The Mac Pro is a brilliant box, but it's completely wasted on OS X. Vista x64 uses it to it's potential...SuperFetch is a brilliant idea which works exceptionally well. I mean, why have 8GB of ram and only ever use 1GB? Surely the OS should use all the resources available to it to make programs run/launch quicker?
I'm running Windows 7 on it now and that has been very good too.
I think that anyone who actually believes that OS X compares in any way to Windows is disillusioned. You can get far more stuff done on a Windows box. A Windows box works in the way you expect it to and does what you tell it to. Windows is actually customisable without 3rd party hacks.
Yes, Windows has it's problems specially on poor hardware, but OS X has many more, Apples 'closed' attitude being the major one and the inability of their 'engineers' to fix problems being a close second.
Apple and OS X hide behind stupid adverts which are blatant lies, designed to appease fanboys.
As soon as you try to actually do anything except use the internet or email on OS X, you start hitting glitches.
@seven7dust
Macs are NOT user friendly in the slightest if you have a problem with something. Trying to fix issues can be very user unfriendly. The user interface is also very childish and messy and doing simple things like searching for system files means you have to jump through hoops. You also cannot customise to get rid of that awful grey colour. Apple made too many choices on behalf of the user then hid the rest of the options so you have to resort to 3rd party hacks to change things.
Maybe any _idiot_ can use a Mac, lets face it, they are hardly rocket science, but thats the point, Apple treat all their users like idiots. They have simplified everything to the point of it being unusable.
a median over the largest collective databases of statistics worldwide give mac osx a userbase of 5.24%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems
statistics isnot the department where pro apple media use fair-play. this article is ********
it's actually impressive of Apple to have 5.24% share worldwide
cause they make a hell of a lot more profit than others
BMW is also the same they sell fewer cars but make more profit
Reality check.
Hardly anyone cares about Macs.
Is there really that many PS2/3's on the web?
The things you are saying is flaw are actually features.
by default Win7 doesn't ask you to confirm your actions that require admin privileges. Only program's actions will be asking a confirmation. However you can change this function.
You seem to a die-hard Apple fan-boy, who will favoring Apple to death even if it kills you.
Mac OS will never take over because (1) it won't run on PCs and (2) Apple will never make enough Macs to replace all the PCs out there.
Geeks (like you and me) will talk about Linux until we're blue in the face, but our parents and grandparents -- and probably our brothers and sisters -- will keep buying and using Windows PCs and Macs because, well, because they're not geeks. Ninety-five percent of the people out there want a machine they can buy, turn on and use. They want easy and friendly, and that's where Windows and Mac set the bar.
- by zelrik February 2, 2009 10:05 AM PST
- I like how people talk about data that has no error bar. You guys should go on Wikipedia and look up for "statistics","accuracy","systematic errors"....
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (78 Comments)Those graphs are about as accurate as weather forecasts...