Microsoft OS rules: Tell us something new

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New research from Onestat.com amongst 50,000 subscribers from over 100 countries has drawn the startling conclusion: Microsoft dominates the global operating system market.

Really?

It owns 96.97%, to be precise, with Windows XP taking 86.8% and Windows 2000 taking 6.09%. What’s vaguely amusing is that the now officially defunct OS – Windows 98 – runs on more computers than Mac OS X: 2.68% to 2.32%.

In fifth place, with 1.09% of the market share came the ill-fated Windows ME. Unfortunately for open source fans, Linux came a lowly sixth, with 0.36%, followed by the exiting Windows NT, with 0.24%.

Last and least with 0.15% was something labelled Macintosh Power PC – I
assume this is pre-OS X stuff (I wonder if anyone is still running
System 7.x or earlier?).

It’s not clear how the data was collected, but presumably any other
operating systems were deemed too few to register, or no-one visited
the appropriate statistic measuring sites to have their system
registered. VMS anyone?

So, Microsoft dominance. Yawn.

It will be interesting to do this in another couple of years time to see what impact Vista has on the share.

Andy Merrett
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