Apple market share continues to climb, Windows drops
They are not dramatic changes, but they are steady and heartening to the Apple universe of users and developers. The trend continues from December numbers, and for Apple, all the trends are good.Net Applications, a company that tracks operating system and market share by looking at results from search engines, reports that Apple has a 9.93% share of OS users for January of 2009, up from 9.63% the previous month. Windows OS market share measured 88.26% in January, dropping slightly from 88.7% in December.
If you add in iPhone users (0.48%) to the Mac OS X data, the Apple market share is 10.41%, which again, is higher that last month.
Browser shares are also an interesting data point. Net Applications says Microsoft's Internet Explorer has the lowest market share since they began tracking browsers in 2005. IE users now comprise 67.6% of the browsers online. In the last 12 months, IE has dropped about 8%.
For the third month in a row, Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome all gained market share at the expense of Microsoft. Safari's share of 8.3% is a record for Apple.
These numbers continue to be good news for Apple, a company trying to buck a nasty recession along with the rest of the industry.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
DaveP said 1:09PM on 2-02-2009
Crappy pie chart clearly not made in Numbers - guess Apple has not penetrated the Net Applications company that did the study.
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Tony C said 3:48PM on 2-02-2009
1988 called. They want their dot matrix printer back.
Ridgecity said 4:21PM on 2-02-2009
That's looks like Powerpoint's templates from 10 years ago, I guess they are also implying there's a very slow attachment rate for any office software.
Fairly said 2:50AM on 2-05-2009
They're a Microsoft IIS/ASP site. Clearly they don't have much of a clue about network security either.
ryemac3 said 1:18PM on 2-02-2009
The more amazing part is that Linux has been around for 20 years and it only has twice the presence than that of the iPhone. Amazing
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Wheels said 4:09PM on 2-02-2009
I'm not surprised.
Fairly said 2:52AM on 2-05-2009
Give credit where credit is due for that: Richard M 'Fuzzball' Stallman. But it's not been around 20 years. Linux started about 1992. Petitesse but still and all.
Alex said 1:20PM on 2-02-2009
Just wondering, where's the financial benefit in browsers? I guess that what the default home page is has some value, but other than that, does an increase, say, in the number of people using safari over IE have any effect on Apple's profits?
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wako said 2:39PM on 2-02-2009
cant say i know for sure, but i would assume that google and other search engines pay browser companies, to have their search bar search with them or what not.
Fairly said 2:53AM on 2-05-2009
Apple execs don't live by bread alone but they get a kickback from Google for searches. That's why you can't completely remove the Google search from Safari anymore. Haha.
Quinn Taylor said 1:45PM on 2-02-2009
The point isn't necessarily the benefit from browser share, since the study categorizes by OS platform, not by specific browser. (There are some potential fringe benefits to browser makers, such as ad revenue from Google, but that not related to platform per se.) Rather, statistics such as relative internet activity across platforms describe the demographics of those using each platform. For example, although Linux dominates as a server OS (especially those running Apache) it is less frequently used as a client connecting to the internet than other platforms.
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jonathan said 4:11PM on 2-02-2009
given these tiny percentage changes, can it not be that just a few hundred thousand people didnt use a search engine this month as much as last month? i mean if all their data is based solely on search engine requests...am i missing like another zero or something....?
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Dave said 4:42PM on 2-02-2009
Given that it's based on percentage, the general idea of statistics is that even if 100k fewer people used a search engine, the assumption is that the average use would drop across each platform equally. Same goes for an increase in traffic.
When the sample size is small, variations are larger compared to the amount of data, and the picture is less accurate, but as the sample size becomes infinitely large those variations become less consequential.
Now this isn't going to be an exact science, and different methods of measurement will obviously vary.
Fairly said 3:00AM on 2-05-2009
As for accuracy: I don't know. Don't have a clue. What's important is the buzz is out there. Microsoft used to destroy competitors by releasing survey results that showed their own products were more popular. Even when they weren't. At the very least Bill and Steve are tasting their own medicine and I'll drink to that any day!
Flunky Carter said 2:41PM on 2-02-2009
CHECK
YOUR
DAMN
SPELLING.
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Rob said 2:47PM on 2-02-2009
This is good. I hope that Apple can make it to about 15-20% in the next couple of years.
The really big benefit I see of this is that many more web pages are accessible using Safari these days. When I switched in 2005 I would regularly have problems with IE only websites. At the time I kept the old OSX IE version installed for when I really needed it.
These days it is rare to find one that doesn't work right. The only one I can think of is Yahoo Canada news :(
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Fairly said 2:56AM on 2-05-2009
15-20% is nice. Anything diminishing the stranglehold of Microsoft on the Internet is a point for the good guys. But Apple can't go much higher than that. Not everyone on the planet can buy their computer from Apple. There is no way production would work like that. And a world with only one hardware supplier - we're back to Snow White again, aren't we?
Apple need to franchise their OS now. Deal Microsoft the coup de grace.
Brandon said 2:53PM on 2-02-2009
Can you just add in iPhone users without adding in users of other phone OSs?
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Rob said 3:43PM on 2-02-2009
I had a look at the "Net Applications" web site. They seem to track Blackberry, Opera Mini and Pocket IE. I would take from this that they each have less than 0.01%.
I think this is possible, as I found when using a blackberry or pocket IE for web pages, I mostly did not do searches - it might be true for others too.
chrism238 said 3:17PM on 2-02-2009
What is this measure "market share"? In this case, is it just bums-on-seats using an interactive device, or does it factor in cost, servers, workstations, and mobiles, too?
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