Windows Usage Dips Below 90% for First Time

Microsoft’s Windows might still be the dominate operating system on the market, but as more and more people are learning about alternative OS’, their dominance is slowly decreasing, but seems to be doing so at an increasing pace. According to recent reports from Net Applications Inc., a service which monitors select major websites, Windows saw a large 0.84% decrease in usage compared to the previous month, which is the largest drop seen in the past two years.

Those decreases now put Windows right below 90% usage, which while still clearly represents Microsoft’s dominance, it’s still a rather significant change. Apple’s OS X has been the hogging the rest of the OS usage overall, with a recent 0.66% jump to sit comfortably at 8.9%. Linux, in third place, settles in at 0.83% usage.

In Windows-specific usage, Vista claims 20.45% of that usage, while XP continues to slowly drop, but is still the most commonly-used version, at 66.31%. Windows 2000, surprisingly, still has some good usage, at 1.56%. For even more information, you can go straight to the Net Applications site to view and fine-tune the information you’re looking for.

Vince Vizzaccarro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing, attributed Windows’ slip to some of the same factors he credited with pushing down the market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. “The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up,” he said. November was notable for a higher-than-average number of weekend days, as well as the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., he said.