End of an Era? For First Time, Android (Narrowly) Beats Windows For Number of Users Across All Platforms (PCs, Phones, and Tablets)

Note the "all platforms" limitation -- if it occurs to you that Windows must still rule in the PC OS market, your intuition is right.

Windows is beyond dominant as far as the OS on PCs, with an 84% share.

Well look at you! Your belief was right. For once. Congratulations. They say the first time is the hardest.

But PCs are just a part of the picture now, as tablets and phones make up a larger and larger chunk of the personal computer universe.

And as far as all computers -- including phones and tablets -- Android has edged out Microsoft and Windows for the first time, says a firm called StatCounter.

The research arm of StatCounter, the independent web analytics company, finds that in March, Android topped the worldwide OS internet usage market share with 37.93%, which puts it marginally ahead of Windows (37.91%) for the first time.

"This is a milestone in technology history and the end of an era," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "It marks the end of Microsoft's leadership worldwide of the OS market which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a major breakthrough for Android which held just 2.4% of global internet usage share only five years ago."

I guess this means Microsoft was on the ball when it attempted to make Windows a sort of tablet/PC OS hybrid with Windows 8. The execution of that got a lot of criticism, but I guess their goal can't be faulted. They must have seen this coming.

Put me some information, Computer Heads: I've heard, but long ago, that Windows was considered an inelegant and bloated system, and part of the reason for that is that Windows attempted to keep backwards-compatability with earlier versions throughout most of its history, thus always baking that original inelegant, bloated design into every new cake.

Is that still part of the problem? Have they mostly fixed that? Or only patched it up here and there?

If that's a continuing problem to some degree, would it make sense for Microsoft to basically reboot from zero and launch a new-from-scratch OS which would compete with its own Windows line, but without Windows' legacy defects? I know that such a move is dumb in the short term (where you have two competing, incompatible OS's cannibalizing each other's user base), but maybe over the longer term, assuming people start migrating to the new Microsoft OS (which would, assumedly, be better), it would position Microsoft better?

I know people are always praising Linux -- so maybe Microsoft could develop its own Linux-esque, skinnier OS.

I have political and cultural problems with Android and I would prefer there to be a stronger non-Google competitor in the non-Apple tablet and phone markets.

Google is evil and kind of scary, given its virtual monopoly position in many bits of the internet's vital infrastruture.

Below, a song that's pretty terrible and has nothing to do with this post, but maybe it popped into my head thinking about terrible Legacy Relics from the 80s.

posted by Ace at 06:29 PM

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