Linux: Windows 8 increases market share

NetApplications’s statistical experts have released new analysis of operating system spreads. According to this, Windows 8 was able to increase by about one percent to 1.72 percent in December, thus overtaking Linux for the first time. At the top, 45.11 percent is still Windows 7, followed by Windows XP with 39.08 percent. NetApplications also lists Windows Vista with 5.67 percent and the current Mac OS X versions with 2.27 (OS X 10.8), 2.07 (OS X 10.6) and exactly 2 percent (OS X 10.7). This is the seventh place for Windows 8. This is followed by Linux at 1.19 percent.


In November 2012, the first month after the release of Windows 8, the statisticians estimated the share of the latest operating system still 1.09 percent. It is worth pointing out that Microsoft could increase the value for its current operating system by nearly 60 percent. Negative is certainly the small volume behind the numbers. Because Windows 8 should float over time, it will be the successor - rumored Windows Blue - equally correspondingly hard to establish the Windows App Store and thus a Microsoft-owned ecosystem among users.

Not only Windows 8 has a plus. Windows 7 grew by around 0.4 percent, increasing the total Windows share from 91.45 to 91.74 percent. This means at the same time that Apple had to insert with Mac OS X. Apple lost 0.27 points and lands for December 2012 at 7.07 percent. For this, it looks much better with the mobile operating systems. Here, iOS is the market leader with 60.13 percent, while Android comes to 24.6 percent. Windows Phone is 1.05 percent behind Java ME (10.18 percent), Blackberry (1.59 percent) and Symbian (1.53 percent)

To collect operating system data, NetApplications captures unique visitors per page and per calendar day in a network of over 40,000 websites. The figures do not necessarily reflect equipment purchases, but the practical case for a linguistically as well as spatially restricted - albeit not small - online cosmos. You can view the data of NetApplications here. Tip: Follow the PC Magazine on Facebook and leave us a "Like" to keep up-to-date on developments in IT, Internet & Co.