What Does Desktop Marketshare Tell Us Anymore?

Ed Tittel Profile: Ed Tittel

A quick peek at the latest desktop operating system market share pie graph from NetMarketShare.com shows that Windows continues to dominate, with a least a 86 percent overall share. In that mix, Windows 7 rules at 44.48%, XP follows next at a still-high 39.51%, and Windows 8 trails far behind at 2.26% (less than Mac OS X 10.8 at 2.44%, and just over one third of the aggregate OS X share of 6.4% for versions 10.8, 10.7, and 10.6 combined).

Windows still rules the pie on the desktop, but how long can it stay on top?

But there’s another figure on the NetMarketShare page, that tells a changing story that bodes ill for the desktop — and Microsoft — in the long term. It shows the composition of overall share by device type, and distinguishes desktop devices from mobile and tablet devices. Right now, that breakdown looks like 87.8% for desktop and 11.8% for mobile and tablet devices (presumably with the remaining 0.4% allocated elsewhere or lost to rounding error). But on the corresponding mobile share graph, Microsoft barely registers at 1.15% for all versions of Windows Phone, and iOS at 60.56% and Android at 24.51% rule this roost.

The emerging long-term trend, of course, is that the ratio of desktops to mobile devices is going to keep tilting ever more strongly in favor of mobile devices, as billions of new smartphones and tablets get purchased and start tapping into the Internet, particularly outside First World countries where computer ownership is more or less given in most families. In the Second and Third Worlds, however, high costs and  lack of infrastructure, training for, and exposure to conventional PCs combine with an inexhaustible appetite for mobile devices to suggest that sometime in the next decade — perhaps sooner — the ratio will change to put mobile devices in the majority, and those devices will achieve absolute ascendancy as the workloads that demand PCs today can also be accommodated on mobile devices in the future.

When that happens (and most experts are convinced this switchover is just a matter of time) what happens to Microsoft? Good question! Obviously, the company itself is concerned, as its remaking of the Windows 8 desktop as a tablet-oriented OS shows, and as the company’s renewed and intensified focus on Windows Phone OSes also attests. Will it be enough to keep the colossus of Redmond relevant to the emerging 21st century mobile computing landscape? Another good question. I can tell that they’re trying hard to stage a big comeback, but also that success so far eludes their grasp. This should be an interesting technology tango to watch, as Apple and Android seek to eat Microsoft’s lunch. I have to see this as a consumer win, but also hope that today’s highly fragmented mobile landscape finds a bit more order amidst the prevailing chaos as we work our way deeper into this decade, and beyond. This blog may need a new title sometime sooner, if it doesn’t become completely irrelevant before then!

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