microsoft losing its touch? slowly, but surely?

jan 3rd, 2009

or, the revenge of unix. after all, unix underlies the macos and the iphone and android. and of course, the trend towards open source.

from good morning silicon valley.

Microsoft's inconvenient truth

By JOHN MURRELL

Some will say it's just part of a natural cycle, nothing to worry about, but looking at the long, softly sloping line that shows an ongoing cooling trend, Microsoft may be dealing with a climate change. Traffic monitoring service Net Applications keeps track of browser and operating system stats from millions of visits to its clients' sites, and the preliminary numbers from December show Microsoft continuing to slip on both fronts.

Last month, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was used by 68.15 percent of the Web surfers monitored. In January 2008, that figure was 75.47 percent; in January 2007, it was 79.98 percent. If you're in Redmond, that's got to give you a litte shiver. The agents of this erosion? Mozilla's Firefox browser, which started 2007 with a 13.70 percent share and finished 2008 with 21.34 percent, and Apple's Safari, which climbed from 4.72 percent to 7.93 percent in the same span. Even Google's new Chrome browser, still a blip in the market after being introduced just this fall, did what IE could not and won some new fans.

The Net Applications stats on operating systems were no more encouraging for Microsoft. In January 2007, 93.33 percent of the Web travelers monitored were running Windows; last month, that figure was down to 88.68. Across the same period, the Mac share rose from 6.22 percent to 9.63. And while the use of the iPhone for Web browsing is still comparatively tiny, the growth rate gives Apple even more reason to smile. In just the last six months, its share rose from 0.19 percent to 0.44 percent.

In releasing the latest numbers, Net Applications observed that residential use is greater than usual versus office use during the holiday months and that higher unemployment likely meant more users than usual connecting from home, both of which work in favor of Firefox and Mac and against IE and Windows. But smoothed out for such variables, the trend lines still suggest Microsoft better be preparing for a different environment.