Given how MS has been promoting Vista, in no small part by trying to strangle XP (despite consumer interest & demand to stay with XP...see Dell), it should hardly come as any surprise that Vista has had marketplace penetration...as such, it isn't particularly newsworthy.

Nevertheless, http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ does confirm that Vista is at 4.52% for June 2007.

Unfortunately, lazy technology editors frequently make stupid mistakes. The above market share website tracks OS X by underlying hardware, which for June 07 was 3.52% and 2.48%, which means that the sum for all OS X is 6%.

Which means that OS X isis actually the #2 OS. At least for the moment (June 07).

Now a really good technology analyst would say to himself:

'Gosh, if PC hardware is are typically replaced on a 4 year lifecycle, and the OS update comes along "for free", what SHOULD have been the marketshare gain for an OS that is nominally superceding ~90% of the installed base?"

The answer is (0.90)(1/48mo)*100% = 1.875% per month.

Which means that for the seven (7) months since Vista has launched, the marketshare value *should* now be over 13%.

And that assumes *zero* pent up demand for an initial surge.

But at 4.52%, this means that (4.52/13.125) = only ~34% of normal hardware sales are taking the expected normal OS upgrade path.

Amazingly, no one within the community seems to think that it is newsworthy that 66% of current buyers ARE NOT following the traditional pattern.

Readers can decide for themselves if that's newsworthy.

Its also pretty straightforward to take the shares for 98, ME and 2K and cross-reference their recent decline to Vista growth to see just what's being cannabalized.

-hh

" The various distributions of Linux are credited with only 0.71% of the operating system market in June 2007, up from 0.70% in May."

This number is obviously in error. W3CSCHOOLS, for instance, gives web stats for Linux of 3.4%. Ubuntu, alone, claims about 1% market share.

see http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

The Vista numbers given in TFA account for new boxes being purchased alone without any upgrading so they are a symptom of lack of choice to most consumers in the market and not of the merits of Vista. If we extrapolate at the rate of 1% of market share per month for 24 months, XP will still be dominant over Vista. It seems Vista will have to compete on merit in the market place and cannot do it against XP, an OS that was obsolete in 2001 when it was introduced. If M$ kills XP, we will live in interesting times for most PCs cannot run Vista.