Operating system trends 2009 - XP shows decline, OSX and Vista climb, Linux share declines

One of the trends I'm really interested in (beyond the obvious browser market share) is the operating system market share.  2 years ago I held the belief that Linux was going to have it's day *any* moment now.  That moment never came.  It's now August 2009 and how is the market looking?

Vista was released to a somewhat underwhelming response.  XP is still the most popular system by a country mile because it was not only excellent but it was also famously easy to pirate.  OSX has incrementally improved but what's happened to Linux?  Let's look at the graph:

It's quite clear to see that XP and Vista are merely trading users and it looks like the uptake of Vista has increased in the last month or two.  However, OSX has increased a bit too whereas Linux has declined slightly, having not really gained more users in the past 12 months.  What better representation for the stagnation of Linux than this?  Mainstream user conversion is not happening and shows no sign of happening - much to the glee of the Linux fanboys.

I always thought 2007 would be the year of Linux; the tipping point looked perfect.  Vista on the horizon and some very promising, usable releases.  Yet it just never happened.

The statistics are taken from aggregated W3Counter.com statistics, taken from around ~25,000 member sites to offer a broad demographic in an attempt to give a more accurate representation of the current market.  

So, what will the next 6 months show?  My estimate is the increasing climb of OSX and Vista with a gradual reduction in the amount of XP users.  Windows 7 will no doubt cause a sudden reduction in XP users.  Until then, I expect the Linux usage will barely change - if the above graph is any indication, we could see further decline.

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