Windows Vista and Mac OSX see surge in consumer use

While businesses and corporate entities may have little interest in using either Vista or Mac OSX, both are gaining popularity and market share but only in the area related to home or home office use which is both good and bad.

It’s good in the fact that Vista now has a 10% market share in computers that are connected to the Internet, it’s bad that corporations are either not going to deploy Vista or have delayed deployments so much that by the time it comes around again, Windows 7 may be out.

Mac OSX now has something in the area of a 7% market share, Mac use has seen excellent growth over the past year but has not been without its share of problems.  Large corporations would never deploy OSX on a wide scale so that is not a concern there.

Overall Windows still has a near-monopolistic 92% market share, some would argue that Windows allows standardization in software which is a good thing, if we didn’t have this, the world would be a much different and scary place.  We could have 25 different operating systems and software would be much more expensive and there probably wouldn’t be an opensource or freeware market at all.

As for Linux, ComputerWorld says it’s sitting just below 1%. 

In related news IE7 is just about ready to overtake IE6 as the most used browser but Firefox continues to gain popularity.

• Microsoft to business: don’t wait till consumer release before Windows 7 upgrade
• Vista causes surge of OSX Leopard pre-orders
• Microsoft just can’t get the public to like Windows Vista
• Vista Home Basic embraced by small businesses
• Vista is barely ahead of Windows 98 in business market share