Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Windows 7 passed the 5% market share milestone last weekend, which put it, if only temporarily, above the total market share of all versions of Apple's Mac OS X, a Web measurement firm said today. Last Saturday and Sunday, Windows 7 powered an estimated 5% and 5.14% of all computers that were online those days, according to Internet metrics vendor Net Applications. The two-day average of 5.07% was higher than the 5% of the market that Net Applications said Apple's operating system averaged for the week of Nov. 15-21."

This is a welcome reality check. I know that Apple has tremendous mind-share because they spend an ungodly amount of money on prime-time TV advertising telling us how much Windows "sucks", but at the end of the day only 5 out of 100 computers on this planet are Macs running OS X. The market share for Windows that same week was 92.64%. The numbers say a lot - and no amount of reality-distortion field spinning is going to change that. Macs might be the perfect computing solution for some people, but they're not a mass-market product, no matter how hard the Mac faithful want to believe that.

There's also a weird reality distortion bubble in the media - many people in the media/blogging tech world use Macs. A far higher percentage than the rest of the world; just look at figure 2 in this article. I don't know whether it's techno-savvy people who got sick of Windows, or the uber-geek's desire to try the next shiny and new thing, but at many tech events I'm in the minority using a Windows laptop. At that Mobius event OS X had 53% market share; in the rest of the world, 5%. Funny things can happen when you get a bunch of Mac users in the room: they think their platform always matters, even when it doesn't. Sounds harsh, right? Let me explain. Read more...