One of the trends I'm really interested in (beyond the obvious browser market share) is the operating system market share.;nbsp; 2 years ago I held the belief that Linux was going to have it's day *any* moment now.;nbsp; That moment never came.;nbsp; It's now August 2009 and how is the market looking?

Vista was released to a somewhat underwhelming response.;nbsp; XP is still the most popular system by a country mile because it was not only excellent but it was also famously easy to pirate.;nbsp; OSX has incrementally improved but what's happened to Linux?;nbsp; Let's look at the graph:

It's quite clear to see that XP and Vista are merely trading users and it looks like the uptake of Vista has increased in the last month or two.;nbsp; However, OSX has increased a bit too whereas Linux has declined slightly, having not really gained more users in the past 12 months.;nbsp; What better representation for the stagnation of Linux than this?;nbsp; Mainstream user conversion is not happening and shows no sign of happening - much to the glee of the Linux fanboys.

I always thought 2007 would be the year of Linux; the tipping point looked perfect.;nbsp; Vista on the horizon and some very promising, usable releases.;nbsp; Yet it just never happened.

The statistics are taken from aggregated W3Counter.com statistics, taken from around ~25,000 member sites to offer a broad demographic in an attempt to give a more accurate representation of the current market.;nbsp;;nbsp;

So, what will the next 6 months show?;nbsp; My estimate is the increasing climb of OSX and Vista with a gradual reduction in the amount of XP users.;nbsp; Windows 7 will no doubt cause a sudden reduction in XP users.;nbsp; Until then, I expect the Linux usage will barely change - if the above graph is any indication, we could see further decline.