I think that line says it all. It's been dropping ever since they started forcing Vista on people buying new computers. That arrogant move has pushed people to look at Mac and Linux as alternatives. When computers came preinstalled with Windows XP, people were happier and had less desire to explore alternatives.

Most research and published reports are full of kool-aid drinkers.

Since when is the iPhone consider a desktop OS and counted as an Apple OS vs Windows? Majority of the iPhone owners are Windows users.

At the rate of 0.11% per month, oh yeah it will take 1 full year to grow 1.0% whoopie!

Now there is a proprietary monopolistic company if there ever was one. Will they ever drop prices and stop gouging people?? I guess not , as long as people will pay

I'm starting to see elegantly designed, outrageously priced, no choice component iDesktops in the near future. whoopie! NOT!

Ever notice that there are more graphic designers now? Ever notice that in movies only apples are there? Ever notice that colleges portray students as 'needing' an apple? Everyone is believing that apples are the way to go. I remember 8 years ago when you couldn't even start up an apple without it freezing up. Now in the past few years they are suppose to be the greatest thing, but I still have seen so many problems with the design. Look for the random shutdown problem that apple refuses to admit that they are at fault. Look at the safari bug that once again apple refuses to fix. Why is nobody bashing apples because of that? Windows has been working for a long time. People are throwing fits because their old programs and old hardware isn't working with vista. How is it microsoft's fault for other companies driver inability to create good drivers?

People are starting to realize there ARE alternatives to buggy Windows! Its about time!

www.FireMe.To/udi

I believe will be the barrier for Apple (not counting the iphone, which counting it is dumb BTW). If Apple some how gets past that (which even being pro Apple I don't believe they will) then we can start talking about what happens to windows. Prior to that Apple is still a nitch player.

One just has to look to see there are many alternatives to Windows and the list isn't limited to Linux and Apple. I use eComStation on my desktop and Thinkpad. http://www.ecomstation.com There is ReactOS being developed http://www.reactos.org I think this would be ideal for really small notebook computers since it takes up so little space on the drive and uses so few resources. One could check out OSNews to find others. http://www.osnews.com (IIRC on the URL).

Gee...I don't know. Maybe its Vista, maybe its Microsoft's plan to take over the world, who knows. Either way they have two things against them.

1. They took away Windows XP. Even AFTER a lot of people petitioned to keep it going, Microsoft still decided to pull the plug for some stupid hair-brained reason.

2. Microsoft is getting too big. They have so much control now that people are not liking it and now rebelling against them in the only way they know how. Switching to Apple PC's. That will show them.

GET A CLUE MICROSOFT!

Sure...90% overall marketshare for Windows. But considering that the business market(which is VERY very slow to change) is still 99.9% windows based, what does this 90% over all mean to the home market.


90% overall COULD == 99.9% Business 50% HOME market?


The 90% is held way up higher by the business market, this will potentially hide a very strong trend in the home pc market for a long time.

They were not tracking desktop operating systems, they were tracking operating systems used to surf the web. If a person used a Windows CE phone to view one of the monitored sites, it would count as Windows.

I must say that I had no idea how bad Windows was until I dropped it and stated using nothing but Linux and OS X. If a person spends two weeks using OS X, they will never go back to Windows.

Microsoft originally worked on OS/2 with IBM but dropped it to work on Windows. OS/2 has transformed into eComStation. http://www.ecomstation.com I have switched from Windows to OS/2 even though Microsoft tried to 'kill it off' with their FUD. There is even a two projects to clone OS/2; Voyager, http://voyager.netlabs.org and OSFree http://www.osfree.org . OS/2 (now eCS) is still around despite MS's efforts to eliminate it. :)

Vista is another reason to have a good look at ReactOS; an open source clone of Win. It is small, does not hog resources and it is free. It is still being developed but it is - somewhat - usable in its current state. http://www.reactos.org

"...People are throwing fits because their old programs and old hardware isn't working with vista. How is it microsoft's fault for other companies driver inability to create good drivers?"

It is not Microsoft's fault. It is Microsoft's problem!

There are 3 reasons why Microsoft is number one and have over 90% of the marker.
1. All current wide variety of PC hardware and most outdated was fully functional under current Microsoft's or hardware manufacture's easy to install drivers.
2. All tasks that was possible to do on any other OS based PC (Mac, Linux, ReactOS, etc) was possible to do on windows PC. BUT, NOT OPPOSITE!!!!!! There are specific tasks that could be done only on windows PC, because there is no software available for any other OS, but only for windows or even DOS. (WineHQ not always helping)
3. Full backward compatibility. Even most 20 year old DOS programs can be run under Windows XP.

Vista has non of those 3 aces.
Microsoft's fault is that Vista is not backward compatible. Microsoft's fault is that they are killing XP. And, luck of drivers and applications for Vista is Microsoft's big problem and mess. And, if someone not going to clean up this mess real soon, we will see a dramatic reduction in Microsoft's market share. And, preinstalling Vista on all PCs not gona help Microsoft.

where the hell was this study taken anyway? Sounds like from what i read, 91% windows 8% osx, and 1% linux?

Is that the rough estimation? It almost seems like its been shrinking in the past few years.. of course i think if you went to a european city and took a large scale survey and then went to west coast america and did the exact same survey, the results would be very different..

But lets say its a well done test (lol). Its no surprise that Apple is gaining ground: it has hip new products which have been giving popularity and status to people who buy them. When people listen to apple, and then talk on apple, eventually getting a apple is a natural take to showing off their lifestyle... do you really think microsoft has that same kind of image? Not really. Its not got a view which is sustained across all its products.

Vista: Looks like a playground for children, really pretty really great to show off to parents and then your children are left there and the parents go away. The kids try to touch some toys and Vista says "No" in case it would mess up how the place looks by the time the parents come to pick up said children..

Xbox is lol. Filled with the average gamer in mind, they wont really touch vista, they will swear by XP but buy the 360 and most hyped games for it.. But you dont naturally relate 360 to Vista..

MS Office sits in vista, sometimes office pretends that its useful, it shares that look like vista. but you are in the office now, and that vista has been stripped of its prettiness by the office computer techs because your pc is a single core 1.8ghz pc with 512mb ram and most of your work which isnt in office is a proprietry database which queries a server.. which runs linux. But you hardly see the relation between the work computer and your home pc. They look different are used differently and are generally completely un-unified.

And ms has a bunch more applications, but they are even more removed from looking like or feeling very "microsoftish".

With that apple, the ipod felt "apple" the iphone felt "apple" and the imac felt "apple" and that feeling in itself is selling it.

Its my opinion, but selling a feeling is much more profitable then selling tangible and physical software... becuse a feeling is something you create, an illusion. Its cheap. Software isnt. Software is expensive labor intensive and hard. Filled with constant bugs that drive you to re-do it even after release..

That feeling though.. is growing apple.

When was the last time you tried to get a non-Windows operating system pre-installed onto a computer? It was just recently revealed that there were agreements made to install only Windows on computers. It is just recently that one could get a non-Win pre-installed. IBM won a law suite against Microsoft over their use of FUD to destroy OS/2 Warp. While OS/2 is still around in the form of eComStation ( http://www.ecomstation.com ) many companies switched to Windows because of the lies spread by Microsoft.

Windows market share dropped from 90.01% to 89.99%. Well folks I think it's the end of Microsoft. Come on, do we even need an article about that? When Windows goes below say 75% then we can talk.

Does making up fake statistics make you feel better Han Solo? Everyone knows that's what you're doing. It doesn't matter what market share is business vs home users. The simple fact is that M$ has more market share. Do you honestly believe that only 50% of home users use Windows? Give me a break. Mac is definitely increasing in popularity, but not even close to the tune of 50% of home users. You're living in a fantasy land.

Wasn't there just a story about a trojen taking pictures and capturing keystrokes of Mac users? Paying that premium for Mac software/hardware to get your ID stolen. Macs will not over take Windows because of the price and software that is available for Windows users. Last time I checked Windows is the largest gaming platform.

"This figure makes OS X the best-selling UNIX variant ever with the largest overall share of the market"

define "market".

do you refer to "home market"?... "enterprise market"?... "server market"?...

Mac is a big hype... it's nice that it's eroding Windows' piece of the cake, but in no way is the solution to it. Jumping from MS to Apple is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Total installed no. I would not be that surprised to find out that Apple is moving that direction for new computer purchases. I would be less surprised to find out that Apple had 50% of the laptop market.

With any luck, Apple will be pushing 50% market in 5 to 10 years. If Apple keeps getting better and Microsoft quality keeps dropping we will soon be talking about Microsoft breaking the 5% mark.