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Microsoft Windows Loses Its Advantage Over Apple's Operating Systems

This article is more than 10 years old.

A fascinating piece of number crunching over here. It's looking at the sales ratio between the various forms of Windows and the various Apple operating systems.

To give the basic history, way back when, DOS beat Mac OS by some multiple, some 5x or 6x. Those who chose the Apple products were in a minority, yes, but a significant one all the same. Then along came Windows and the multiple by which Microsoft outsold Apple started to soar:

When Windows 95 launched in 1995 it negated most of the advantages of the ease of use of the Macintosh and the PC market took off. The ratio reached 56 in 2004 when 182.5 million PCs were sold vs. 3.25 million Macs.

But what is interesting is how that was the peak of that ratio. The release of the MacBook was the start of that: it was just better than any of the Windows machines available and so it started to gain significant market share. The ratio between Windows and Macs is now down to 20:1. OK, still hugely different but this is the lowest it has been since Windows itself was launched.

And this isn't the end of the story either: if we include all devices, not just Macs, sold by Apple we come down to a ratio of 2:1. That is, when we include all the iPhones and iPads running iOS, plus the Macs on OSX, then windows on PCs is only twice that number of units. And this really does rather change what is going on in the entire computer market. We all wondered if, how or even whether Microsoft would ever lose its effective monopoly of computer operating systems. And it has: although not by being pushed off the desktop by or anything else. Rather, because the entire computing market is wandering off in a different direction: one where the desktop just isn't as important as it once was.

That's the number crunching from the past: my own personal belief, not one I'd care to have to support in detail you understand, is that one or other of the phone operating systems is going to become the next standard. I would posit that give it a few years, perhaps no more than a decade, then our personal computer is actually going to be our phone. We might plug peripherals into it, perhaps a keyboard or monitor, but for 95% of us for 95% of what we do the computing power in a 16 core (which might not take as long as a decade to arrive) ARM chip is going to be enough. We simply won't need or want a desktop then and what value being the monopolist in a product no one needs any more?