An interesting statistic just got released over the OS shares and how they changed in 2006:

  1. Microsoft is not loosing market share: About 93%. People have moved from Windows 98 and 2000 to XP.
  2. MacOS is gaining market share: From about 4,2% to 5,7%
  3. Others are going in the negative direction: From about 3,1% to 2,3%

So what to conclude from this? Perhaps Apple haven’t had a sucsess with their switch campain? They seem not to be taking their new users from the Windows platform, but rather from the alternative platforms like Linux, BSD, SunOS, OS2, BeOS/ZETA and others. Or perhaps, as I guess more and more people are having a computer, the two big operating systems are increasing in number of users and the amount of users on alternative operating systems are relative stable?

As every year, you hear that this year is gonna be the year of Linux. 2006 was definetly not. In December the user share of Linux was 0,36%, up from 0,29% in January. Just a funny side note, by the end of 2006 there was still three times more people using Windows ME then every Linux distro together. Will 2007 finally be the year of Linux? How will Vista be doing? In December Vista started appearing on the net with a user share of 0,16%. Consumers will first be able to buy Vista from the end of January.  

Another thing to notice is that FreeBSD and SunOS were on the list in January with a market share of 0.01%, but dropped out within the year. OS2 dropped out of the list in 2004 and BeOS-based operating systems have never appeared on this list.