Windows is losing market share. OSX has doubled its market share. That's the story.

This seems a bit disingenuous. Obviously Vista will out pace OS X and Linux simply because of the number of new machines sold with Windows. There is no victory for Microsoft in that: that's is business as usual and is merely a demonstration of Microsoft's OS monopoly. Talk about twisting stats. If anything, Apple with its far-smaller user base is doing very well at 7% compared to Vista's 10%.

OMG! Where to start!

First the MS statement for "Vista sales, claiming to have pushed to its channel partners worldwide over 88 million copies of the platform" is SELL IN NOT SELL THROUGH and means NOTHING when accounting for an estimate of the user base. You need reseller sales numbers not Microsoft stuffing the channel numbers.

Second, for December as a whole, Apple Inc.'s machines accounted for 7.3%, up significantly from 6.8% during November. At the beginning of 2007, Net Applications pegged Mac OS X's share at 5.7%, putting the one-year growth rate at about 28%.

But there has been a huge post-Christmas surge, Apple was the #1 seller on Amazon for example, that really put the Mac on the market share map. Net Applications in a write-up on its Web site noted that during Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, Mac OS X-powered machines accounted for 8.01% of those monitored online. "This represents a phenomenal increase of 18% from November for the Mac."

Windows still looms large on the operating system landscape during December. But its market share of 91.8% was down from November's 92.4%. Since 2007's start, Windows has lost slightly more than 2% market share, reported Net Applications. Vista, however, cracked the 1-in-10 barrier for the first time in December, ending the year with 10.5% of the market.

Now, follow me here. In the article the author wrote, "Net Applications estimated a market share of just 7.38% for Vista. The correlation between that percentage and the volume of Vista copies Microsoft has sold is now an indication that the company has passed the 100 million shipped licenses milestone."

Now lets look at the fuzzy math, this article implies that a 10.48% on web equals 100 MILLILION shipped and a thus leaving others in the dust. But what really do these numbers have in common? Even if we could make a 1:1 comparison that would mean that the Mac OS 8.1% figure would mean there are 77,290,076 Mac users? Does the author realize there are only 240-250 million TOTAL computers in the US? Remember Net Applications only monitors US Sites for the purposes of it's numbers. This woudl mean Vista as 50% US Share?

Anyway..this is crazy math too but just trying to illustrate there is NO WAY you can take MS sell in figures, then Net Applications web share numbers, and make the crazy statements above. Especially when you look at the overall decline of Windows which means those users are going soemeplace!

Humm...what was the growth of the Mac again?

Are you insane?

Are you Bill Gates using a pseudonym?

I would have to say that you're "article" seems to be nothing more than a puff piece for MS

Vista is simply the beginning of a long term downtrend for MS as the predominant OS software provider

In fact, Vista is the single reason why I began to deploy Ubuntu on a trial basis with a few boxes at our offices

As to your "facts" where did you get them from ?

I would imagine the MS sales figures cam from MS, because no one else could possibly have them

Are they accurate or perhaps inflated?

The next most important question is are all of the end users with all of those vista installs happy?

Based upon my limited research, everyone is screaming bloody murder because of all of the incompatibility issues with so many software titles

Why else would MS and most computer mfg's begin to back peddle and offer a choice between Vista, XP & Linux?

You might wish to work on your objectivity if you are going to be a journalist

Looks like RDFed Maczealots can't handle the truth. Maybe OS X can gain sometimes 1-2% but Vista especially after SP1 will replace the XP installations and the status quo will prevail.

Has anybody pointed out yet that sales do not automatically mean use? See, I did buy a PC with Windows XP, but now I'm running Linux. It is still very difficult to find a PC without OS preinstalled: if somebody wants a particular machine, they have to come to a compromise... There are no official stats for the number of Linux users - anybody can download the OS - and the user base is fragmented among many flavors.