When I was in school we used DOS. Ok, first I had a Commodore VIC 20, and all I did was play games like River Raid, but then I finally in 1986 bought a Tandy 1000s PC with, if I can remember, an 8088 processor, 20 MB hard drive and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. It was raw, rustic and almost unusable against today’s standards.
Then came Windows 3.1 and the world never looked back.
Today however, for the first time since the birth of the internet, Microsoft’s Windows share of the internet connected computer market has dipped below 90 per cent.
In November, 89.5 per cent of internet users who connected to websites monitored by Net Applications Inc. used Windows as their operating system, a decrease of 0.84 per cent from October. The decline was the biggest in the past two years and offset a number of recent gains. Much of Microsoft’s decline was a result of Apple which saw use of its OS X operating system grow by 0.66 percentage points to 8.9 per cent in November. Operating systems based on the open-source Linux platform also gained in the month, climbing from a share of 0.71 per cent to 0.83 per cent.
What does this mean?
Well for one thing nothing. As applications, tools, content, etc. are built for the internet, rather than the local computer, the operating system becomes less relevant. Second, with the majority of business computers requiring Windows to run corporate applications, it is hard to see a substantially greater reduction in the near term.
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