Latest Stats as at 3/4/2010. ============================ These figures cover the 13-day period 19/3/2010 to 31/3/2010. Owing to a web hosting system failure followed by poor support from the hosting company Hostway, no log files were made available for the 16th to 18th March 2010 and the log file for the 19th March was incomplete. Even worse, the entire site was hacked this week, with criminals installing java scripts on many pages, presumably so that people who viewed these pages then had details from inside their computer sent invisibly to websites in foreign countries. It's all fixed now and (touch wood) things are reasonably back to normal. Last fortnight I said "With a smaller sample size it's harder to draw good conclusions." In hindsight, the 9-day figures measured were a bit off due simply to sampling error, and the conclusions that were drawn were somewhat off the mark. Let's try again. Operating System Market Share ============================== For period 19th to 31st March 2010, these percentage figures are based on visits, with earlier figures in brackets:- XP 49.4 (49.0, 48.9, 50.0, 49.4, 49.9, 50.4, 54.7, 54.8, 56.1, 56.3) Vista 21.9 (22.1, 22.9, 22.4, 24.1, 24.3, 24.6, 23.4, 24.8, 25.1, 25.8) Windows-7 10.4 (9.7, 9.3, 8.0, 7.3, 6.1, 5.3, 4.2, 3.4, 2.8, 1.9, 1.5) Other Windows 2.7 (4.0, 4.0, 4.3, 4.0, 3.5, 3.9, 3.9, 3.2, 3.0, 3.2) Mac 10.4 (10.4, 10.0, 10.2, 10.1, 10.6, 10.1, 9.6, 9.5, 9.2, 9.2, 8.7) iPhone 2.1 (1.9, 2.1, 1.8, 2.0, 2.1, 2.3, 1.4, 1.4, 1,3, 1.1, 0.9) Other Mobiles 1.8 (1.7, 1.5, 1.7, 1.6, 2.0, 1.9, 1.5, 1.5, 1.3, 1.2) Linux 1.4 (1.3, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5, 1.5, 1.6, 1.3, 1.3, 1.2, 1.4, 1.2, 1.2) At 10.4% Windows-7 is now over the 10% mark Measured since the start of the year, basically Windows-7 is growing at about 0.9% per week, whilst Vista is declining at 0.4% per week and XP is declining at 0.7% per week. This is not fast enough to make the squillions of dollars desired by Microsoft shareholders, so keep watching the computer press for wacky press releases and biased commentary. Expect campaigns from Microsoft aimed at getting big corporate users to go Windows-7. And Office 2010 is on the way. Expect more bogus promotion about the benefits of "the ribbon", despite the training costs for all users given that many well-loved menu items have simply disappeared. My recent experience is that end users find apps written in Access 2003 easier to use than the same app running in Access 2007. Put simply, too many well-established usability principles have been ignored by the fresh-out-of-college programmers and graphic designers at Microsoft. As for earlier versions of Windows, notice that the combined share of all the old pre-XP stuff has suddenly dropped from 4.0% to 2.7%. The long term trend must surely be down, so the recent figures over 4% are artificially high somehow. As much as it might be fun (it still works fine, you can burn a copy of the CD, you don't have to register it etc), I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a worldwide Windows 98 revival. I need to point out that the mobile market for smart phones and beyond comes on top of the normal computer market. However, combining the figures into overall percentages gives the impression that the Microsoft share is declining. But on the desktop Microsoft is as dominant as ever, with only a slight drift to Apple and none to Linux, and no new players arising. In the Mobile area it's a different story. Microsoft has not done well and a lot of other players plan to keep it that way. At the moment, mobile devices are only about 4% but this figure has doubled in less than a year. Choppy seas ahead. The total sample size was a bit lower than usual with 13333 visits by humans. Browser Breakup =============== Percentages of visits for the period 19th to 31st March 2010:- IE 55.3 (57.6, 56.8, 57.2, 56.1, 57.0, 55.7, 60.0, 59.9, 60.0, 60.6) FF 25.4 (23.5, 24.1, 24.9, 25.3, 24.4, 25.1, 24.1, 24.5, 24.8, 24.6) Safari 9.8 (9.6, 9.6, 9.8, 9.2, 9.7, 10.2, 10.5, 8.6, 8.4, 8.1, 8.0) Chrome 5.9 (5.4, 5.7, 5.1, 5.1, 4.6, 5.1, 3.9, 3.9, 4.0, 3.2, 3.5, 2.8) Opera 1.5 (1.7, 1.5, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.5, 1.9, 1.9, 1.7) All Others 2.1 (2.2, 2.1, 2.1, 2.3, 2.1, 2.2, 1.8, 1.7, 1.5, 1.7, 1.6) IE is declining slowly. The previous measurement was on the high side. My comments about Mozilla last fortnight were wrong. The Firefox figure of 25.4 is the highest ever measured and Firefox is certainly not in decline. Chrome continues to grow. The sample size was a little lower at 13102 visits by humans. Search Engines Share ==================== Percentage breakup of visits coming via search engines for March 19th to 31st, 2010:- Google 90.6 (89.1, 90.1, 89.6, 89.5, 88.1, 89.5, 88.0, 88.4, 87.7, 87.6) Yahoo 4.5 (4.9, 4.2, 4.5, 4.8, 5.9, 5.1, 4.6, 5.5, 5.8, 6.1, 6.1, 5.8) Microsoft 2.5 (3.5, 3.0, 3.1, 2.7, 3.0, 2.8, 4.0, 3.3, 3.9, 3.4, 3.5) All others 2.4 (2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 3.0, 2.9, 2.6, 3.3, 2.8, 2.6, 2.9, 2.8) Last month's figures were too low for Google and too high Yahoo and Microsoft. I commented it was "Hard to believe, but we'll see next time". This month shows Google back over 90% and it's looking more like a one horse race every week. Yahoo and Microsoft are way below 10% of Google, and the "others" category is on a long, slow slide. That 2.4% is the lowest ever measured; old favourites like Altavista and Excite are gradually being anihilated and no-hopers like WebWombat and Sensis are doing very badly. The sample size is a little lower at 10347. ============================ =============================