OS Statistics

September 11, 2007 9:09am

What do statistics mean? Are they revelations on our society as a whole, or mere simple statements made by a small part of the polled population?

I was interested to see some statistics today, on what Operating Systems have been doing for the past four years.

In March of 2003, 1.8% of computers were running Mac OS X. Meanwhile, 93.2% of computers were running some version of Windows. Surprisingly, Linux was in more widespread use than Apple at 2.2%.

Today, Windows makes up only 87.1% of the market. While that drop may seem minor, considering that Apple more than doubled its own stats, now at 4%, having risen slowly but surely (with only two instances of “backsliding”) you can’t help but wonder why this is. Linux has also gained market share, now weighing in at 3.4% (from a high of 3.6% in December 2006/January 2007).

Consider that traditionally, almost all businesses ran Windows. Recently, China’s government and many other corporations have been moving to Linux, which might explain its rise (as it is very unlikely that the average user would switch to Linux, given its much greater learning curve.) But you don’t exactly hear about a lot of companies switching to Macs, and certainly no organization as large as the Chinese government. So it stands to reason that the average user, nearly en mass, is making the switch.

What do you think?

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