Windows Wins, Mac Loses February Market Share Race

Windows' market share came back to life last month as Apple's Mac OS X slipped by the largest amount in over a year, a Web measurement company said today.

By Gregg Keizer
Mon, March 02, 2009

Computerworld — Windows' market share rebounded last month as fewer users ditched Windows XP and more started running Windows 7, an Internet measurement company said today.

Meanwhile, Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X lost ground in February as its online share dropped by the largest amount in more than a year and a half.

In February, 88.4% of users who connected to the Web sites monitored by Net Applications Inc. did so from systems powered by Windows, an increase of 0.22 of a percentage point over January. The increase was the largest for Microsoft Corp.'s operating system since June 2007, when it gained 0.40 of a percentage point.

Although Windows XP lost share again last month -- the 20th consecutive month it has done so -- it slipped only 0.09 of a percent point, just a tenth of its 12-month average decline. In February, Windows XP computers accounted for 63.7% of all the machines that connected to Net Applications' sites.

Contributing to Windows' uptick was Vista, which ended the month with a 22.8% share, up 0.31 of a percentage point, and Windows 7, the not-yet-ready successor to Vista. The release of a public beta six weeks ago has put Windows 7 on 0.18% of all computers, an increase of 0.07 of a percentage point over January's share.

Windows 7's share is now within striking distance of the much older Windows 98 (0.21 percentage point), but still trails by a large margin the almost-as-old Windows 2000 (1.35 percentage points).

The boost to Windows' share followed a record three-month decline that saw the operating system lose 2.2 percentage points, and marked the first time since October 2008 that Microsoft's OS showed an overall gain.

But while Windows increased its share, Mac OS X's fell for the first time since October 2008, dropping 0.32 of a percentage point to end the month to wind up with a 9.6% share. That was the biggest one-month decline since June 2007, according to Net Applications' data, when Apple's OS fell 0.45 percentage point.

February's slide didn't erase the 1.7-percentage-point-gain of the November-January stretch, also a record, but it did knock Mac OS X off its path toward a 10% share, pushing it back to December 2008 levels.

Net Applications' operating system market-share data can be found on the company's Web site.

You are here: Technology Topics » Operating Systems » News

Most Recent Operating Systems Stories

White Papers »

Watson - A System Designed for Answers. The future of workload optimized systems design

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and DeepQA technology. Read the white paper about Watson's workload optimized system design.

It's A Bold Statement from IBM: "the one system that will unite all the others."

With 1.5 billion instructions in one second (BIPS), while consuming less energy than ever before, Wintergreen Research says IT departments need to sit up and take notice of this hybrid system that combines the System z with servers.

HP NonStop SQL Fundamentals whitepaper

This whitepaper offers a detailed look into the fundamentals of HP NonStop SQL solutions. See how this system delivers unprecedented levels of application availability with fail-safe data integrity and meets the needs of enterprises with large-scale business critical applications.

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter