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No, Windows 7 Market Share Has Not Surpassed Mac OS X (Yet)

Nov. 28, 2009 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

I call out this stupidity when people try to prop up Mac OS X market share, so I'll do it now as well: Despite what you may have read (and, really, Gregg Keizer should know better), Windows 7 has not yet surpassed Mac OS X's market share. The reason is simple: Market share is sales over a set period of time (usually a quarter in the case of PCs). And we don't know what Windows 7 sales are like yet. Make no mistake, Windows 7 market share will surpass that of OS X by the beginning of 2010, obviously, when the first quarter of Windows 7-based PC sales becomes available. It's literally just a matter of time.

But it's not 2010 yet. So we don't know what PC sales are doing. In the meantime, what we do have, as always, is "usage share as measured by which OSes people are using when browsing to certain sites on the web." This is not market share. It's not even usage share. It's just what I say above in the quotes and nothing more. You can make generalizations about these worthless numbers if you want. But you cannot morph them into market share or usage share. They're just not representative of either.

So while I'm OK with that fact that more people were browsing certain parts of the web using Windows 7 than were OS X for a certain time period last week, this doesn't mean anything.

And I wish others wouldn't promote this stuff as news. It's certainly not that either.

Discuss this Article 13

anonymous
on Nov 28, 2009
This post was mentioned on Twitter by Windows Observer: No, Windows 7 Market Share Has Not Surpassed Mac OS X (Yet) - http://bit.ly/5qnV1Y
mikegalos@msn.com
on Nov 28, 2009
Just being pedantic, although Paul's article and conclusions are right, the title isn't. Instead of "No, Windows 7 Market Share Has Not Surpassed Mac OS X (Yet) " it really should be "No, We Don't Know Whether Windows 7 Market Share Has Surpassed Mac OS X (Yet) " If we don't know that it has, we also don't know that it hasn't.
roteague
on Nov 28, 2009
I agree with Paul. The only reason Windows 7 won't surpass OS X is if sales were to crash; a scenariou that is highly unlikely given recent trends.
Ocean
on Nov 28, 2009
Its a good thing Apple understands business better than Windows fanboys. Thats why even with a small marketshare, their profit share (and arguably mindshare) are extremely high. Great technology and great business.
whiplash55
on Nov 28, 2009
When, and not if, is obvious but the reality is Apple is an extremely good operating system that has had great success in recent years. I don't think it matters to Apple, they make their money from their hardware which has one advantage over all other PC's. It can run the two most popular OS's without a hack or a questionable tweaks. I prefer Windows machine's largely because I still build my own desktops and I find the new Mac laptops horribly overpriced for the hardware you get. But Its great for consumers to have such great competition. Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and I hope Paul finished COD Modern Warfare 2. Been a little quit over here.
Ocean
on Nov 28, 2009
"I find the new Mac laptops horribly overpriced for the hardware you get" Bull. Prove it.
Prs
on Nov 29, 2009
"Ocean said: Thats why even with a small marketshare, their profit share (and arguably mindshare) are extremely high. Great technology and great business." That's it! It's not really about market share, is it? We can appeal to much more abstract and less measurable benchmarks of success, such as "mindshare". Even if that comes back negative, we could just appeal to the Marxism notion of false consciousness. Ocean said: "Bull. Prove it [that the new Mac laptops horribly overpriced for the hardware you get]." I was under the impression that, when it comes to hardware, Macs being overpriced compared to an equivalent Windows computer is something of a paradigm position. Thus the burden of proof would be yours.
Prs
on Nov 29, 2009
mikegalos@msn.com said: "Just being pedantic... If we don't know that it has, we also don't know that it hasn't." A pedant, as Bertrand Russell once said, is merely someone who prefers their statements to be true.
whiplash55
on Nov 29, 2009
"Prove it" OK http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB990LL/A?mco=MTM3NDczMDY http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dydwgn2&c=us&l=en&... Dell XPS Studio for a bout 100 less. Double the ram, faster processor, better graphics, double the hard drive, faster hard drive. That's with a fairly high end PC notebook, you can get better specs for a lot less if you buy an Inspiron or an HP DV4. Any more softballs?
thebluemeanie
on Nov 29, 2009
Ah, the old trick of selective comparisons. Add on an LED display and a 9 cell battery, and your Dell now costs $1,404, which is $200 more than the MacBook Pro. If one configures the MacBook Pro with a 320 GB HDD and 4 GB of RAM, it still comes out $5 cheaper than the Dell.
chuckb84
on Nov 29, 2009
"That's it! It's not really about market share, is it? We can appeal to much more abstract and less measurable benchmarks of success, such as "mindshare". Even if that comes back negative, we could just appeal to the Marxism notion of false consciousness." Marxism, that's rich! Here's some Marxism for you: Apple market cap about $180B, Google about $180B, Microsoft about $240B. Everyone else, essentially irrelevant. (Beleaguered Dell is about $28B, 1/6th of Apple. Maybe we should sell it and give the money back to the Dell shareholders.....) So, keep up the prattle about market share. Mindshare can be defined in one quantitative way as what investors think the company is worth. So, 3% market share, or what everyone outside this little echo chamber thinks Apple is worth? In fact, it isn't about market share. GM still has a lot of market share, no profits or mind share.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Nov 29, 2009
Whiplash "[Apple Macintosh hardware] can run the two most popular OS's without a hack or a questionable tweaks." The two most popular OS's are Windows XP and Windows Vista with Windows 7 and "all versions of Mac OS X combined" competing for third place. As this artlcle points out nobody sure which is in 3rd and which is in 4th place. What you're really saying is: "[Apple Macintosh hardware] can run Windows XP and Windows Vista without a hack or a questionable tweaks." which is really not much of an achievement as it is true for virtually all generic PC hardware. Of course, my Windows 7 Professional system can run both Windows 7 and Windows XP simultaneously using Windows XP mode. And since I have a choice of hundreds of vendors hardware, thousands of computer models and millions of possible configurations that can ALL do that, I'm not tied to the configuration whims of one vendor with a limited number of possible configurations which are unlikely to coincidently meet any user's specific needs. Now, if you meant "All versions of Windows" versus "All versions of Mac OS X" as the "two most popular OS's", that's a bit less than honest since you really are meaning "only the last few versions of Mac OS X that support Intel" and "only the last few versions of Windows that Apple chooses to support with BootCamp" and that's a lot less choices. Of course, if we ignore those earlier versions of Windows that Apple chooses not to support as having too small an installed base to matter then we're likely to eliminate pretty much every version of Mac OS X ever made by holding Apple to the same criterion of minimum market share you choose. And, sadly, all of that was, apparently, your way of defending Macintosh as a good choice because it can now run Windows for those time when Mac OS X and the Mac OS X ecosystem aren't up to the job.
Ocean
on Nov 29, 2009
"We can appeal to much more abstract and less measurable benchmarks of success, such as "mindshare"." Or we can appeal to the more measurable than market share benchmark of profit share. "nobody sure which is in 3rd and which is in 4th place." Can you run a wildly profitable and enviable business with less than 5% of the total volume in the space you're competing in? You can if you're a really special company.

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