It seems that Apple and Mac OSX have been stopped in their tracks and giving a nice push backwards by Windows 7. According to NetApplications.net, Microsoft Windows increased their overall market share for the first time in months, and Mac saw a loss equal to Windows gain.
Overall for the month of February, Windows accounted for 92.1% of the operating systems that powered machines visiting the 40,000-plus sites that NetApplications monitors for clients of its analytics service.
Although the increase was slight, just 0.1 of a percentage point boost, that’s still an increase non the less and it was the largest Windows had posted since June 2009. Windows had been losing market share to Mac apart from just 3 of the last 12 months.
The unsurprising trend of Windows 7 increasing and Windows Vista and XP decreasing continued. Windows XP slipped down to 65.5%, down 0.7 of a percentage point, its smallest drop since last September. Vista, meanwhile, seems to be slipping away rapidly on us, thank god! It lost 1 percentage point last month to end at 16.5%, with February setting a record loss for the operating system. Vista has now lost usage share four months in a row, and in five of the last six months.
Windows 7 on the other hand, Microsoft’s success story has continued to climb from 7.5% up to 8.9%, at this pace, Windows 7 will smash the 10% mark by the third week of March.
Last month was also the first time since the launch of Windows 7 that Windows Vista lost more market share than Windows XP. Even so, XP has slid 75% more than Vista in the last three months, not surprising since the eight year old and rapidly ageing OS is the most popular on the planet by a large margin, making it more likely that people are replacing XP instead of Vista with Windows 7. However since Windows 7 has been released, XP has dropped more than twice as much as Vista’s market share.
Mac OS X’s usage share slipped 0.1 of a percentage point last month. Apple’s operating system has lost market share three of the last four months, and is down about 5% from its October 2009 high. However this doesn’t necessarily indicate a loss in sales for Apple, just the fact that there are more machines out there using Windows
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