Microsoft's OS dominance drops to below 90 per cent
Windows' stranglehold on the operating system market loosens
Microsoft’s grip on the operating systems market has weakened, with its share dropping to below 90 per cent, with Apple’s Mac OS X seizing nearly 10 per cent of the market.
According to figures from Netmarketshare for April, desktop machines running Windows have dropped to 88.7 per cent, while computers with Mac OS X have risen to 9.5 per cent, with machines running Linux making up the remaining 1.6 per cent share.
Windows 7 has suffered a sizable drop, with its share of desktops falling by over four percentage points to 47.8 per cent.
This could be attributed to the release of Windows 10, but oddly its share only rose by 1.1 percentage points to 15.3 per cent. Windows 8's share rose a full percentage point to 13 per cent.
One particular figure stood out, with the venerable Windows 3.1 making a return after it became EOL a full 15 years ago, rising to hold 0.45 per cent market share.
We suspect this one is down to the recent addition of an emulator by the Internet Archive allowing you to run a virtual 3.1 machine online. Linux suffered a small drop in market share this month as well, falling by a 0.13 per cent to 1.6 per cent.
But when combined with the jump in Mac OS X share, the total of people not using Windows is now 10.22 per cent. And, keeping in mind the fact that Windows works across multiple form factors, which Netmarketshare does not delineate, then the real number could be even higher.
These figures could either be a blip in Windows’ dominance or indicative of a new trend where people are getting fatigued with using Windows and are looking for alternatives offered by Apple or are using devices built on top of Linux.
With Windows offering a limited deadline for users to upgrade to Windows 10, there is a risk that its most recent operating systems could fall short on the significant market shares Windows 7 and Windows XP have held over recent years.
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