Operating System and Browser Market Share
White Paper

Vista, XP, and Server Market Shares

The Browser Market Share and Operating System Market Share White Paper data is by month starting in September 1997 through the August 2009. The data sampled is internationally based (Just under 50% of the data points sampled are outside of the United States).

Operating System Market Share

Since the March 2009 announcement that Microsoft will be releasing its replacement (aka System 7) in the fall of 2009, the number of PC that have Vista installed has come to a standstill at just over 18%.

Even without that announcement, the number of users who have opted to install Vista has been very low.

Browser Market Share

In the last several months Microsoft has stabilized its browser market. Firefox and Google (Desktop and Chrome) are still forces that could eat away at the Microsoft browser monopoly. So far user acceptance of Vista has been slowed by the lack if user acceptance for the new OS.

Live update did not help in accelerating the acceptance of IE 7, plus with the slow acceptance of Vista individuals and enterprises are not moving to the new version as rapidly as Microsoft would like. An added kicker is those who move to Vista can more readily have multiple browsers on their systems or switch from one to the other quickly and with little pain. The cost of doing that is minimal.

Google with it browser Chrome will be the next challenge for Microsoft to face. Based on our test results IE 8 and Firefox 3.5 are significantly more robust than prior versions. The current version of Chrome is not yet as stable.