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Windows 7 will need to tame Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, a task that Windows Vista has failed at. Neither Windows XP, nor Vista have been able to stop the combination of Mac computers and OS X gaining more and more market share, and
increasing inroads into the Windows and PC territory. At this point in time, it looks that the recently released XP Service Pack 3 and Vista Service Pack 1 do not have sufficient strength by themselves to gear consumers exclusively to the PC, and away from Macs and OS X. Over the past years, Apple has been increasing its market share consistently and is penetrating into the corporate space with no less than 80% of businesses running Macs and OS X.
"As the computerization of the enterprise continues and as ubiquitous connectivity takes hold, empowering employees with the tools that help facilitate anywhere connectivity becomes key. Apple's strong marks in security, features, performance, usability and reliability are indicative of the qualities customers' value when purchasing hardware and operating system software," explained Laura DiDio, research fellow, Yankee Group.
According to statistics from Net Applications, Mac OS X accounted for 7.83% of the operating system market at the end of May 2008, up from 5.99% in July 2007. At the same time, Windows is down to 91.13% at the end of the past month from 93.28% in July, last year. For Microsoft, Vista is adopted just as fast as XP in the corporate space, the company claims, and the availability of SP1 and respectively SP3 concomitantly will not benefit the latest Windows client in terms of accelerated adoption.
This while over 21% of the 700 global IT administrators and C-level executives surveyed by the Yankee Group indicated that their organizations are running over 50 Macs. Overall, the number of companies now integrating Macs into their IT infrastructure has almost doubled in comparison to two years ago.
Of course, at the same time, Microsoft is also winning over Apple. The reason why Apple hardware is increasingly preferred is that Macs can run both Windows XP and Windows Vista by default via BootCamp, but also because of the virtualization solutions available for OS X, enabling users to deploy Windows as a guest operating system.
With Windows 7, Microsoft needs to use this aspect to its advantage, but also to bring back the focus on the PC market and its traditional OEM partners on which it counts for over 80% of the Windows Client Division's revenue. The successor of Windows Vista will have to prove superior to OS X Leopard and the upcoming OS X Snow Leopard on Macs, but also on PCs, to at least curve the continuous erosion of the Windows market share.
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