While Microsoft’s Windows 7 has been making tech news, Apple’s Mac OS X has moved up the market-share ladder. Apple’s operating system continued climbing for the third consecutive month, closing in on 10 percent of the operating-system market, according to Net Applications. Apple now claims 9.9 percent of the market.
At the same time, Microsoft’s Windows operating system saw three consecutive months of decline. As of January, Microsoft Windows had 88.3 percent of the market, a .42 percent drop from December and a 2.2 percent decline in the last 90 days.
That’s the largest slump in a three-month period in the four years Net Applications has been gathering operating-system data — and it doubles the previous record, set from December 2006 to February 2007. During that 2006-2007 period, Windows fell 1.1 percent. Windows XP caused most of the loss.
Usage Varies By Day
After a dismal showing with Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft has much riding on the launch of Windows 7. Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows 7 in mid-January and it now has one-tenth of one percent of the operating-system market, according to Net Applications.
Net Applications gathers its data on operating-system usage from its Web analytics program.
“Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays,” the company said in a note on its Web site. “Beta users are taking the time and effort to install it on their home computers, since corporations generally prohibit beta operating systems to be used in production environments.”
Microsoft has said it will put out a release candidate of Windows 7 as its next step — there will be no second beta version — but the company has not offered a release date.
According to Microsoft, Windows 7 was built around consumer feedback. Some of the…