Operating System Stats: Apple Outperforms Linux 2004-2007
What I'm looking at
What I'm looking for is which of the underdogs has been performing best in the past couple of years, making most gains on the operating system market. Clearly the overall winner for this is WindowsXP, gaining 34.3% since 2004 but which has been winning over more people - Mac or Linux.
What was analysed
Looking at the statistics from 2004 onwards (as above) I analysed the differences month on month to give a score to each operating system based on the overall claim they've taken. The results are graphed below:
*apologies for the low quality Excel graph
Graph Explanation
In the above graph the gains are shown on the Y-axis with the timescale on the X. What can be seen is XP makes leaps and bounds whereas Windows2000 and Win98 are both making differing losses. The underdogs in question just sit around the 0% mark, making small 0.2% gains here and equal amounts in losses elsewhere. Ultimately the results for them comes out as:
| Year | Mac | Linux |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 0.7% | 0.3% |
| 2005 | 0.2% | 0.7% |
| 2004 | 0.7% | -0.4% |
Note: 2006 values are based on statistics up until Q3, Q4 is not taken into account.
Conclusions
So what conclusions can be made from this? Well, overall Linux has only gained 0.6% in two years compared to the 1.6% that the Mac has - so I suppose the Mac is the winner. Although, I do find it odd that Linux didn't do better in a year where various governments and organisations opted for an Open Source solution. Maybe the results for Q4 2006 would make a difference but as it stands, on the statistics provided by the W3C the Mac user base has been growing at a faster rate than the Linux one. It does show that the "underdogs" as I like to refer to them are struggling to make substantial gains month on month compared to the goliath of XP (and soon to be Vista).
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