Windows is generally perceived as the perpetual bronze winner in a three horse race against Apple's Mac OS X and the open source Linux, despite the fact that Microsoft continues to account for in excess of 90% of the operating system market. According to the Redmond company, the operating system vulnerability counting games has been indisputably won by Windows, by Windows Vista, in fact. But the Windows operating system has also won another small battle over rival products Mac OS X and the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, Pingdom informs.

In April, May and June 2008, Pingdom tested the software update "access point" availability for Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Windows. The aim of the test was to determine which operating system envoys the best update support from its vendor, considering strictly the accessibility factor.

"It turns out that Microsoft wins this one hands down. Their Windows software update was available 100% of the time," a Pingdom representative stated. "Apple had a respectable 99.9% uptime for its software update. It was only unavailable a total of 2 hours and 34 minutes. Ubuntu on the other hand came off worse, with only 98.64% availability for its main repository. That is a total of 1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes in the three months of this survey."

Although Windows is the clear winner because of the perfect uptime of update.microsoft.com, the aspect that separates it from Mac OS X's swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog is insignificant to say the least, just 0.01%. At the same time, Ubuntu does not rely exclusively on archive.ubuntu.com, but also on additional repositories for serving updates to the homonym distro of Linux.

"It should be noted, though, that Ubuntu's repositories have mirrors around the world, so users can download packages from those as well," the Pingdom representative added. "The monitoring was done using Pingdom's uptime monitoring service, performing a test once every five minutes. Downtime was always confirmed from two different locations."