14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's flagship products, Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System made available to businesses in November 2006, and to the general consumers in January 2007, have fueled Microsoft's growth in fiscal year 2007. The Redmond company is in fact crediting its $51.12 billion in revenue in the past fiscal year as driven by its main cash cows, the Windows platform and the Office productivity suite, Vista selling 55 million licenses, while the later pushed over 70 million copies in FY 2007. But still, the general focus is on Vista's performance compared to rival operating systems and inhouse competitor Windows XP.
In the Annual Report 2007, Microsoft acknowledged its competitors. The Windows "client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. The Linux operating system, which is also derived from Unix and is available without payment under a General Public License, has gained some acceptance as competitive pressures lead PC OEMs to reduce costs. The Windows operating system also faces competition from alternative platforms and new devices that may reduce consumer demand for traditional personal computers," reads an excerpt from the Microsoft Annual Report 2007.
While enumerating its rivals on the operating system market, Microsoft failed to differentiate them in any manner. But the fact of the matter is that Mac OS X and Linux are the two operating systems natively perceived as Windows alternatives. However, both the UNIX-based Mac OS X and the open source Linux prove to be little competition for Windows Vista, according to statistics made available by W3Counter, which has the two operating systems close to flatlining in their race to catch up with Microsoft's latest client platform. According to W3Counter, Mac OS X grew from 3.71% in August to 3.74% in September. At the same time, the various distributions of Linux increased their market share from 1.37% to 1.38%. And while Mac OS X and Linux were jumping 0.03% and 0.01% respectively, Vista went from 3.66% to 4.01%. Of course that the statistics are in strict correlation with the Internet metrics mechanisms of W3Counter. In fact, data from Net Applications, while supporting the perspective that Vista is outpacing its competitors, offers a different view.