I rated this 'poor' as it doesn't appear to consider the fact that virtually all retail PC's sold have Vista pre-installed. I strongly suspect that if the statistics were to more accurately reflect (or factor out) the sales of Vista that were to folks that didn't understand that they had a choice, things would change.

I get the impression from most of the authors of such articles that they see this as being a negative. I for one do not care if Linux becomes the worlds dominate OS, and quite frankly view with suspicion the commercialization of Linux. If for what ever the reasons MS remains the dominate OS that to me is a positive because that means that their OS's will continue to remain the security targets for the foreseeable future. However for the people and the companies that want to see Linux adopted at a higher rate than is currently the case the main reason for this has nothing to do with the technical merits or weaknesses of Linux but has more to do with a total lack of marketing to the masses. The vast majority that I talk to have never heard of Linux and the ones that have are only aware of the name and not that it is a viable replacement for Windows. Most are shocked when they put a live disto that I have given them into their PC's and see how attractive and full featured a modern Linux distro is.

Of course, when you look at these statistic and see how much--as a whole--Microsoft has increased it's market value, you realise it's not a major blow to the other operating systems.

Linux has more than doubled according to these statistics, Mac has upped by almost a percent, while Windows has only increased by 1.4% overall. Considering Microsoft's mass market, the figures aren't all in their favour.

Agreed - the commentary is ludicrously at odds with the figures. The market share of Linux has increased by 119%, and OS X by 17%. How can this remotely be described as having 'almost flatlined'?

There is also another reason why the statistics of Vista-users are flawed: People who buy a computer for using Linux on it often are forced to buy Vista together with the hardware.

Like me: I have recently bought a notebook. It had Vista installed, but I don't use Vista on it: I removed the original harddisk and put in another (higher capacity) one and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it. Using it for business.

Now in the statistic, I am probably counted as a Vista user but I am not: I am using Linux, downloaded from the Net, from a mirror maintained by my ISP. I have copied the Linux OS over from my desktop PC. No statistic can cover such uses of Linux.

And from what I can tell from friends and discussion forums and so on, these uses are quite frequent.

>> There is also another reason why the statistics of Vista-users are flawed: People who buy a computer for using Linux on it often are forced to buy Vista together with the hardware. >Now in the statistic, I am probably counted as a Vista user but I am not: I am using Linux, downloaded from the Net, from a mirror maintained by my ISP. I have copied the Linux OS over from my desktop PC. No statistic can cover such uses of Linux.

This statistic measures operating systems used on the internet, not machine sales.

So removing Vista and installing Linux doesn't matter, you will still be counted correctly as long as you surf using Linux.

I am a Bulgarian.

Hmm, I used to be a Windows user from 1994 to 2002 when I began to experiment with Linux. I tried about 10 Linux distributions and I can not live without this OS now. Since 2005 I switched totally to Linux (particulary SUSE but could be any other Linux distro). During that time many of my friends switched from Windows to Linux also or began to use it on a double boot principle.

There are some serious myths about Linux though. One of them is that Linux is hard to learn and hard to work with. The problem is that people here in Bulgaria are so accustomed to Windows that it is so hard to switch to something different. 90 % of the OS in Bulgaria are simply pirated and are simply Windows XP. The new computers come with a preinstalled stupid Windows Vista which seems to be the worst OS Microsoft has ever produced. I have totally forgot about restarts, viruses and etc. thanks to the Linux community. If I had the money I would buy a Mac with OS X but Linux is best for poor eastern Europeans like me. At the university we throwed out licensed Windows XP and replaced them with Ubuntu Linux with all MP3 and players and etc. Now the admin doesn't have to install one copy of Windows every week...
Linux might have some serious problems still but is stable and work friendly (not just user friendly). I can simply rely on it which I could never say for Windows. And I know many people who are ready to take the time to jump into the universe of Linux. I am talking about normal desktop users.Most of my friends use now a dual boot system...I gues s that at some moment of time the windows part will just be forgotten?

(Written on Firefox 1.0.6 on SUSE Linux 10.0 on an old Pentium II, 350 MHz with 192 MB RAM and 40 GB HDD. Try to put Windows XP or Vista on this hardware...Mplayer under Linux plays movies normally!!!!!!)

after all have said and done, I still stick to Windows Vista, I'm currently running it on my Laptop with dual core process and it works so smoothly, the graphics is lovely, I love vista, I love windows products, I love gaming on my PC also running windows Vista, what ever you say, windows is still the best operating system on the planet for me!!! Long live microsoft ! cheers!!! :P

Quite insane article... 'course users are migrating from XP to Vista... never hear of "vendor lock-in" ??

The point is that some of them are moving to other OSs instead of Vista conquist previous not-windows users...

In fact the total market share of MS Windows is quite fastly dropping.. Never happened before in the 30 years of MS history!

Linux has 0.91% market share. After 17 years that is a failure. Keep in mind that is all 80,000 distros combined.

Of course Windows is not losing market share quickly, 90% of the population is made up of sheep that need someone to tell them what to do. Windows is the dominant platform, so that's what they use. Personally if I have to actually pay for something, I prefer that it work well, so I use both Mac and Linux, avoiding Windows as much as possible, and when forced to use it for an application required by a client I use a virtual machine.