Windows Vista gained on Mac OS in October

November 2, 2008

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The MSS (Market Share Survey) from Net Applications says it reported some increase for the Mac OS for the months of August and September, but said that October numbers were lower.

Last month, the Mac OS and iPhone growth slowed to a little over 3.1 percent, down from 6.67 percent in September.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Windows operating system was up slightly, at 0.25 percent, thanks to a healthy 5.2 percent jump in Vista’s market share.

Net Applications’ Market Share Report doesn’t actually measure the actual share of market as a percentage of revenue or unit sales.

In Gartner and IDC’s latest market surveys, Apple’s share of the U.S. market had grown to about 9.5 percent and 9.1 percent respectively, largely at the expense of HP and Dell.

What Net Applications measures is actually based on browser data from about 160.4 million visits to websites operated by Net Applications’ clients. That's the average number to which users of each operating system are hanging out on the Internet.

What the Web metrics firm’s latest data show is that in October, Windows users and Vista users in particular were coming online at a faster rate than Mac OS users. This was despite the fact that sales of Mac computers grew 21 percent worldwide last quarter according to Apple, and about 30.1 percent in the U.S., according to Gartner and IDC.

Some observers say Microsoft’s $300 million ad campaign for Windows helped boost its numbers for the quarter.

Below are the summaries of the latest Net Applications reports, broken down first by OS and then by different versions of those operating systems.

It will be interesting to see and compare these numbers to the next quarter. It might still be too early however to say that a new trend is developing here, but it could be. Time will tell.

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Source: Net Applications Inc.

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