Vista replacing XP, not growing

I would not use the word "Carve" to describe the miniscule gains in market share that Apple and Linux has achieved. In fact the gain is probably well within the margin of error for calculating such things. No I wouldn't use the word carve, flea bites perhaps, or spoon licks, a better metaphor would be maybe "crumb sweepings" but carve I would save for the chunk that will taken from Intel for it's anti-trust activities, we all hope anyway.

Replacing XP? I very much doubt it, more like Vista is replacing Win 9x boxes that the owners can no longer put up with,

I love the biased reporting here. While you brag about Mac OS gaining market share and Vista only getting a few percent more then it had, seems odd that the yellow line representing Mac OS is lost in the mix of lost OS's while the green line of Vista steadily seperates itself from the pack. Face it. You just can't admit it. Vista works fine and your puckered up from eating sour grapes...

what on earth was RV thinking. This wasn't a pole of 1000 computers over what OS they would buy tomorrow, this was from the logs of many web servers across the net. The statistical error rate is tiny. The average user replaces a PC every 3 to 5 years. The Mac numbers show about 20% of users upgrading from PowerPC to Intel in 1 year. Traditionaly Macs do last longer, so that's about on target. Only 11.7% of Windows users upgraded to Vista, which would imply a replacement cycle of 8.6 years. People are actively avoiding it. Of the remaining 8% or more of people who you would have expected to upgrade their Wintel PCs it seems that up to 22% of them have moved to Macs rather than wait. If I were Microsoft I'd be worried.

You're mixing two percentages in your article - market share % and % growth since last year. You say the 2.56% increase in market share by Vista is "measly" but then claim that Linux grew by 18%. That's a different measurement (growth since last year), and if you apply that to Vista, it grew over 297% since last year (July '07 to June '08). In fact, I have no idea where you got the 2.56% number from. Vista's market share went from 5.43% to 16.14% in a year (July '07 to June '08). Difference in market share is thus 10.71%. Actually, your Linux number doesn't make sense either. Can you re-compute all the numbers you list, and explain where you're getting them from? And your statement that MacOS grew because of XP's demise makes no sense. Looking at the data, MacOS increased due to Win2k and "Other"'s demise. The Vista+XP percentage is basically the same over a year.

1)According to NetApplications, GNU/Linux was at 0.47% in August 2007 and now is at 0.8%. That is more like an 80% increase annually. further, 2)Why is Apple at 8% when it is selling only 3% of PCs globally? Methinks this is a sample biased towards USA/Europe. NetApps, for example, shows only 2% of hits from China. The global numbers for GNU/Linux should be something like 7% if M$ is at 90% and Apple takes 3%. GNU/Linux has had huge rates of increase for many years. There is no way it is below 1% globally. The new low-end notebooks with GNU/Linux could boost GNU/Linux share by 4% this year alone. GNU/Linux owns the low end and is chewing on the middle now that the public is aware of it.

Microsoft already owns, what, at least 85% of market share, right? Of course they're all upgrades. How much is it really supposed to be able to grow beyond 85%?

That Vista share is purely from users ignorant of the issues with Vista (Joe Public) that buy what the store salesman tells them. Since all new systems sold to the uninformed public are infected with Vista.... there is your market share. As for the use of "carve", more like "exfoliate"!

Data is collected "...from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers..." This won't count the two Linux servers at our house nor the growing number of embedded Linux based systems in various bits of hardware. Vista may be replacing XP for wibbling. Is Linux is replacing XP for doing real work? ScottJ

Now if I could just get Mary Jo to Exit writing, mechanism could be left to create HiQual software O/S on its Own. By Pushing software On Public Before its time, With So Many reporting errors, like Longhorn is called Vista, Whats NT6, etc, it really unleashes Half Baked crowd into Still Blending cake. TS drashek

These figures relate to desktop, and not in the server online arena where the action is. Only a complete imbecile would front a Microsoft based machine on the internet or use it for anything even remotely web associated.

By the August 2002 release of XP SP1, Windows XP had surpassed 98. That's just one year after the release of the OS. Vista has had 2 years and one service pack but still barely manages a 16% install base.

People have been commenting on this kind of stupidity for ages. And all those who spit out statistics like that still don't get it. You simply can not calculate this correctly !!! So why bother??? If I buy a PC in a shop preloaded with Windows and then erase it and install Linux how does that count? Linux market share or Windows? How can it be calculated if nobody knows what I installed? I've been buying windows PCs since 1998 and installing Linux right away, did it all count as Linux market share??? I don't think so. Did someone say browser? Well, it's all childish. A browser can be set to sghow anything or nothing at all. I might not even want to go online at all. So, how would those idiot statistitions know what I run on my machines? They just might assume but assumption is the mother of all ... Cheers.

I suspect the author was drunk.

I have been a loyal Microsoft user until the release of Vista. It is a shoddy product as are the service pack fixes. Dell, HP, and others are now charging a fee to load XP rather than Vista on a new machine. I'm migrating to OS X and Linux for my systems needs in the future.

I've had XP Pro since it was first released and loved it. It's been the best OS MS has ever made. That said, unless Windows 7 is a significant improvement over the horribly DRM infested Craptista (also known more commonly as that crap, Vista), I will be moving to Linux and use WINE for maintaining my XP compatibility. I've been playing around with Linux for more than a decade having learned how to use it and Unix in college. Linux has come a LONG ways since then and is gaining ground rapidly. Give it another couple of years development in improving ease of use with driver and application installations and it can easily replace Windows. What it needs most to succeed though is software and game development. Given the performance/resource penalties of and a great many gamers severe dislike for Craptista, it may be the best alternative. Especially since any major game studios that use OpenGL like Blizzard would have less difficulty writing/porting games to Linux and MacOS than anything else. (i.e. consoles, Vista etc.) In any case, I will NEVER pay any company for an OS that actively restricts what I can use my PC for and actively spies on how I use my PC. I will not pay MS to sell out my PC and fair-use rights to corporate entities like the RIAA and MPAA. MS received MILLIONS from them for that DRM infestation so why should we pay them too? I don't know how MS ever thought they could get away with that very easily. Yes, I realize that most people are little more than sheep but with enough bleating eventually even the sheep will bolt.