Microsoft's Windows sees biggest drop in market share |
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MicrosoftMicrosoft
's Windows operating system last month saw its biggest dive in market share in the last two years, an internet research company reported, erasing gains made in two of the last three months. Market share plunged under 90 per cent for the first time.In November, 89.6 per cent of users who connected to the webites that Net Applications monitors did so from systems powered by Windows, a drop of 0.84 of a percentage years, and easily bested other recent down months, including May 2008 and December 2007, when Windows lost 0.51 and 0.63 percentage points, respectively.
Net Applications is an internet research company and is a leading source of applications for webmasters and e-marketers based in California, United States.
Apple's Mac OS X, meanwhile, posted its biggest gain in the same two-year period, growing by 0.66 percentage point to end the month at 8.9 per cent. November was the third month running that Apple 's operating system remained above eight per cent.
Vince Vizzaccarro, Net Applications' Executive Vice-President of Marketing, attributed Windows' slip to some of the same factors he credited with pushing down the market share of MicrosoftMicrosoft
's Internet Explorer browser. "The more home users who are online use Macs, Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up," he said.November was notable for a higher-than-average number of weekend days, as well as the thanksgiving holiday in the US, he said. Windows' share typically falls on weekends and after work hours, as users surf from home computers, a larger percentage of which run Mac OS X.
Notable in Windows' downturn was a dramatic drop in share of the aged Windows XP - the largest decrease since January 2008 and a major uptick in Windows Vista's share. While XP lost 1.81 percentage points, Vista gained back 1.16 points of that, its largest move since last January.
Windows 2000, the only other edition that Net Applications tracks, continued its slide toward one per cent, falling to 1.56 per cent during November.
As expected, Vista cracked the 20 per cent mark for the first time last month, ending November with a 20.45 per cent share.
Windows' share shows no sign of stopping its slow slide - in the past 12 months, MicrosoftMicrosoft
's market share has fallen from 91.79 per cent, a decrease of more than two percentage points. During the same period, Apple has increased its operating system market share by 1.56 points, or a gain of 21.3 per cent.
Net Applications also noted a small boost in market share for the open-source Linux operating system, which grew from 0.71 per cent in October to 0.83 per cent last month.
In August and September, however, Linux had a share above the 0.90 per cent mark.
By Staff Writer
© Emirates Business 24/7 2008
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