Chicago (IL) – It seems Microsoft may have found some support under Windows’ market share, as the operating system has seen a more stable environment and slowed bleeding share to its rivals, especially Apple.
Spring 2009 may look a lot brighter for Microsoft executives after seeing Net Applications’ latest market share numbers and how the compare to the competition. Windows Visa gains market share at a faster pace than Windows XP drops. Windows 7 has posted strong gains already; however, they are not quite enough to put Microsoft in the black, yet.
Key trends in March reveal that the decline of Windows XP is accelerating, as the operating system lost 0.68 percentage points, as opposed to only 0.23 points in February. Windows XP remains the dominant operating system with an estimated share of 62.85%. Windows Vista continues to play the role of the fastest growing operating system in absolute numbers and gained 0.94 points over the past three months and 0.51 points between February and March alone. Vista now stands at 23.42%.
Windows 7 now has a greater market (0.21%) share than the remaining copies of Windows 98 still in use (0.19%), Net Applications said. Windows 2000, NT, Me and 98 gave up a combined 0.17 points over the past three months. The combined Windows market share was 88.14% in March, according to the market research firm.
Apple came in at 9.77%, up from 9.61% in the prior month. Mac OS X 10.5 was the driving force behind this trend, showing a gain of 0.56 points in March, from 5.64% to 6.0% market share. Linux also showed improved share, which climbed from 0.88% to 0.90%.
Probably the most impressive market share number in the entire listing is Apple’s iPhone OS, which is estimated at 0.49%, which is more than half of the entire Linux market share. It is more than twice the market share of Windows 7. In comparison, Google’s Android holds only 0.06%, which is, by the way, twice the market share of the Playstation 3 (0.03%), according to Net Applications.
