Apple market share continues to climb, Windows drops

Why is everyone so enamored by the stupid pie chart? Look, the thing that is very misleading about any market share numbers concerning Apple Vs. Microsoft is that Microsoft only makes the operating system but many companies make the hardware, apple makes both and does a fine job at that as well as marketing themselves internationally. So that puny 9% is a lot more grand when you take into account that 1 company is carrying a tenth of the industry on its back including 100% of an entire operating system and much of the superlative accessories and software as well as the hardware while there are thousands of Windows compatible companies vying for the market share! I think Apple is doing fine and they were doing fine with only 3%. So what if Jobs is worth only 6 billion compared to Gates' 80 billion, they are still both billionaires.

"Windows OS market share measured 88.26% in January, dropping slightly from 88.7% in December."

Didja hear that, Redmond? The writing's on the wall!

"Net Applications, a company that tracks operating system and market share by looking at results from search engines"

No, it does not. It just tracks many websites like any other web analytics software and compiles the results. From the source:

"We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month."

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

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?

Can you just add in iPhone users without adding in users of other phone OSs?

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 :(

CHECK
YOUR
DAMN
SPELLING.

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....?

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.

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?