Windows’ biggest challengers - Mac OSX & Linux

According to Gartner’s new released data - One of the toughest challenges that Microsoft windows has to face is, the new growing market for Mac OSX and Linux OS. Statistically, the revenues from global operating systems was estimated to be $30.4 billion in 2010 out of which Microsoft asserts their first position with a 78.6 percent market share.

While the tremendous increase in the growth of Linux and Macs in the server and client operating system segments was worthy of note, the rate of growth of the Apple’s platform Mac OS increased at the rate of 15.8% while that of Microsoft’s Windows grew by only 9.2% as reported by Gartner.

The main reason for this thrust on increase in the desirability of all Apple products was as result of the constant innovation on the part of the company. With latest devices like the smartphones and tablets, all the other Apple’s devices also saw a good increase in the sales numbers.

In the server market segment, Linux had a continued growth and its Red Hat was taking over the commercial Linux (server) market share as well. The revenues from Red Hat systems grew by a whopping 18.6 percent as against the 7.5 percent growth reported by Microsoft’s Windows server business. This was attributed to the change in preference of the end users to embrace open standard systems than others. According to market sources, Linux was on its way to become a clear substitute to Unix and other operating systems available in the market right now. Apart from these, other majors such as IBM and HP reported a share of 7.5 percent and 3.7 percent respectively in the operating systems market share.

According to the intercepts of Bill Gates interview, which was conducted by Cringley, it is Steve Jobs who is making a difference in the way Apple was growing as a computer boutique. He also said that there were a lot of differences in the way things were handled by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs such as lifestyle homes and planes etc. Among the many differences it was the multifaceted personality of Steve that made Apple such a huge success in the market was indeed fascination. The kind of market penetration that Apple’s overall product sales had shown was sure to challenge the best of Microsoft products that are a brain child of Bill gates.

There were a lot of enterprises that moved away from Microsoft products to other alternatives. This was rather witnessed even at individual end users making use of Mac systems for personal use as well. Now the biggest challenge for Microsoft is to handle the tough challenge that all the alternate products like Mac OS and Linux were offering in the open market. Microsoft needs to soon make a major revamp before it can stop Apple from getting a bigger share of market pie. But, this is not that easy since both MS and Apple are gorillas in the market, almost equally backed up.

It’s a kickass fight ON!