Microsoft's Windows operating system continues its downward trajectory on a spiral that is seeing it continually losing “eyeballs.” Even with the launch of Windows XP
Service Pack 3 and the fixing of Windows Vista RTM with the release of
Service Pack 1, the market share of Windows has continued to drop throughout 2008, and the past month made no exception to the trend. The open source Linux and Apple's Mac OS X proprietary operating systems are eroding the Windows audience bit by bit, and have taken the platform below the 90% market share mark.
According to statistics released by Net Applications, Windows' market share at the end of November 2008 was of 89.62%, down from the 90.46% of the previous month. Microsoft has recently released Windows Vista SP2 and
Windows 7 pre-Beta Build 6801 to testers worldwide. However, even with the service pack and the pre-Beta milestone of Windows 7 leaked and available for download via torrent websites, Windows has failed to receive a breath of fresh air.
Between October and November 2008, the share of Mac OS grew from 8.21% to 8.87%. During the same period the usage share of Linux distributions also increased, climbing to 0.83% from the 0.71% of the previous month. At the start of December Windows 2000 continues to have a market share larger than all Linux distributions, namely 1.56%, that is almost double.
Windows Vista and Firefox have approximately the same market share worldwide. While Firefox managed to nudge past the 20% milestone and jump to no less than 20.78%, Vista, now with SP1, is up to 20.45% from 19.29%. The release of SP3 did nothing for Windows XP, and the operating system continues to lose market share, the most of it going to Vista, especially since Microsoft discontinued retail and OEM license sales of the client as of mid-2008. XP is down to 66.31% of the operating system market.
