Smart thingies running anything but that other OS are taking over the world. According to DisplaySearch, “Smartphone shipments are expected to surpass 800 million units in 2013″. Only a tiny percentage of those will run M$’s OS. Around 15% of access to the Internet used smart thingies in 2012. Expect that share to increase.
Now, that doesn’t mean 15% of users rely solely on smartphones for Internet access but surveys report that a good number do operate that way. As Wintel PCs age or die and are not replaced, that share will increase. I expect all that is holding back that growth is the high cost of Internet access over wifi. In countries where ISPs are often wifi only, the share is much higher. In Kenya, for instance where wired access is largely skipped to save cost, 34% of Internet access is via smart thingies.
Young people I know, with sharp eyes and nimble fingers, do the majority of their Internet access via smart thingies and they rarely use a Wintel PC. One is considering buying a PC just for video editing and M$ is not being considered because of the negatives. That leaves MacOS from Apple or GNU/Linux. LightWorks coming down the pipe for GNU/Linux may be the decisive factor. Even gamers are looking at GNU/Linux as state of the art.
Everyone has good reasons for escaping M$’s clutches and there are few M$-only applications that cannot be replaced by something that runs on GNU/Linux or can be accessed from a GNU/Linux client. The result is a much more rapid erosion of M$’s share of client IT than we have seen in recent years, nearly -3% per annum. In 2011, the decay was -2%. Wintel is going over a cliff. The only thing holding that fall back is the installed base which is huge.
Statcounter shows a lot of that lost share going to iOS but that’s probably only in developed markets which can afford to throw money at Apple. Globally, Android/Linux is taking a huge share. No one is under the illusion any longer that M$’s OS is needed anywhere in IT these days. We’ve seen huge migrations of one organization after another and now in the consumer-space M$ is losing share. Their last niche is business and LibreOffice is taking care of that…“This growth is reflected in the downloads of the Windows and MacOS X versions during 2012. The number of unique IPs who have downloaded LibreOffice has grown from just over 200,000 per week in January to well over 600,000 in December, for a total of 15 million unique IPs in 2012. Linux users, with very few exceptions, do not download LibreOffice as they can get the software from the repository of their distribution of choice.”
The majority of M$’s client licensing comes from OEMs. Their desktops are not selling at Walmart these days and the notebooks are in a huge slump. I expect 2013 will not be just the fall of Wintel but some kind of catastrophic crash. I look forward to M$’s filings today. This should mark a whole year of stagnation while the world of IT gallops onward.
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12776
206
3
2
23891 
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11702 
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There are, from your own claims, more smart phones and tablets in use in the world than Windows PCs yet they are being used in only around one out of eight internet accesses? That doesn’t seem to be much of an endorsement. People prefer conventional PCs in a ratio of 6 to 1 is my assessment of these numbers.
bw wrote, “People prefer conventional PCs in a ratio of 6 to 1 is my assessment of these numbers.”
No. Smart thingies are selling only about twice as often as x86 PCs. What the numbers show is that the installed base of PCs is eroding and the installed base of smart thingies is growing. People are not replacing their ageing PCs. What will they do when those ancient relics die? Some will be replaced but many will not.
With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a
http://hackaday.com/2013/01/26/gizmo-board-a-tiny-x86-dev-board/