Microsoft Windows’ market share is on the verge of falling below 90 percent this year, according to the latest data from Net Applications, diluted by the uptake of alternative mobile operating systems.
Windows’ market share, which includes its mobile Windows OS performance, sank to 90.29 percent in December 2010, down from 92.21 percent the year before.
Meanwhile Apple’s Mac and iOS platforms took 5.02 percent and 1.69 percent respectively last month. Mac OS share was down from its peak of 5.27 percent in October 2009, while iOS adoption more than doubled last year, when Apple sold millions of iPhones and iPads. The rest of the operating systems – Linux, Java ME, and ‘others’ – accounted for three percent of the pie.
Best online Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Certification at certkingdom.com
Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, said growth in smartphone and tablet browsing posed perhaps the greatest influence on Windows’ performance.
“With a full HTML browser and multi-touch interface, the iPhone was the first mobile device to see rapid growth in browser usage,” Vizzaccaro said. “Apple has expanded on that success with iPad and iPod browsing, so that iOS is now the third most used operating system in the Internet. Since the introduction of the original iPhone, everyone else has been trying to catch up with Apple.”
Microsoft’s end-of-year Windows Phone 7 devices and Windows 7 tablets, meanwhile, have yet to make a major dent in the mobile operating system space.
But Vizzaccaro says things could heat up this year as the economy improves, and consumers finally replace outdated Windows models with newer ones. “While there is no guarantees who will benefit from this the most, we could see a growth spurt in Windows 7 usage,” he says.
The latest data from Net Applications comes from monitoring traffic into 40,000 different websites.