Latest Stats as at 20/10/2008.
These figures cover the 15-day period 1/10/2008 to 15/10/2008. 


Vista Market Share
==================

For period 1st to 15th October 2008, figures based on visits:-

XP 68.6 (was 69.2, 70.4, 71.6, 71.8)
Vista 17.9 (was 18.3, 17.5, 15.9, 15.8)
Other Windows 5.3 (was 4.5, 4.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.6)
Mac 6.6 (was 6.1, 6.0, 6.3, 5.8)
Linux 1.0 (was 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.4) 
Others 0.7 (was 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.6)

Vista seems to have stalled again.  
Mac share is over 6% but Linux continues to slide.
Windows has had some very bad techo press in the last few weeks: 
an article explaining the worst 10 viruses over a decade and 
blaming it all on M$; and article saying how to save money in the 
recession by not going Vista - I predict this to be a huge problem 
for M$.  They have extended the end-of-life date for XP three times 
now.  Earlier versions of Windows are hanging on and won't go away.
 
  
Browser Breakup
===============

For the period 1-15 October:

IE 68.9 (was 69.9, 69.7, 70.5, 71.4 and 72.0)
FF 22.9 (was 22.3, 22.5, 21.7, 21.3)  
Safari 5.0 (was 4.8, 4.4, 4.8, 4.8)
Opera 0.9 (was 0.7, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1)
Chrome 0.9 (was 0.7, 0.8)
All Others 1.4 (was 1.7, 1.6, 1.9, 1.7)

Firefox growth has steadied off. Firefox supporters 
need to assess what their "final" market share might be.
If it is say 33% then they may reach the end result in a year or so.
But if they have set their sights on 50% or even more, then 
this point is years away and may even depend on Microsoft failing.

No one will remember that Firefox (with the no-scripts add-in) 
is the most secure browser in the world unless they also read 
lots of articles saying IE8 is dreadful.


Firefox 3 Takeup
================

The EEE PC from Asus comes with FF2 not FF3.  Examples like 
this mean the takeup of FF3 in the Linux world is very low.

In a major oversight, Xandros has distributed FF2 on the EEE 
without setting the browser string correctly.  The distro should 
say Xandros, and something should indicate the hardware is 
EEE with the Atom chip.


Search Engines Share
==================== 

October 1st to 15th.

Google 87.0 (was 86.4, 87.8, 87.2, 85.7, 86.6, 86.2)
Yahoo 7.5 (was 7.8, 6.8, 7.3, 7.3, 8.0, 7.5, 7.8)
Microsoft 2.0 (was 2.3, 1.7, 2.0, 3.3, 2.6, 2.1, 2.3)
All others 3.4 (was 3.5, 3.6, 3.5, 5.0, 5.0, 3.7, 3.7)

There are no "Google killers" on the horizon.  


Linux Distro Analysis
=====================

The Linux EEE reports as Linux i686.  
If a revolution is happening out there with mini-laptops,
I can't measure it. 

Actually all the major stores are selling the XP version 
of the EEE.  A Linux version of any brand of mini-laptop 
is not easy to find and this certainly is not the "year of Linux" 
that the British magazines were predicting back in June.


Search Strings
==============

My search strings database now contains over 63,000 search strings 
and over 16,000 words.  Inspecting a sample of the 16,000 words 
shows many typos which can easily be translated to the correct word; 
many other words are product names, people's names or place names.  
Others are compound words such as bondibeach and hydrodog - things 
which the human brain can crack apart almost without noticing.

It's very clear that Google is far ahead of its rivals in grappling 
with the complexities of language despite the massive R&D budget 
of Microsoft.  The end result is that people prefer Google - 
it works better and it seems to know what you are thinking about.

Parallel to this, there has been a definite drop in the number 
of "page hits" returned by Google as matching a given search - 
a clear indication of a shift from quantity to quality.  
The era of everyone claiming to be the largest search engine 
with billions of pages indexed has quietly ended.

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