In 2011 Microsoft will lose a significant part of it’s market share in the PC operating systems market. In a market where Microsoft is traditionally very dominant with about 90% of all devices on the Internet running Windows, it will lose about 10% market share in this year’s PC sales alone. You might think, where does this guy get this idea from? How is this possible? Well, it’s due to the definition of “PC” that Microsoft uses. In the traditional PC market, this year’s market is estimated between 361 and less than 400 million pieces. That excludes about 53 million expected tablets.
Tablets typically run Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry Tablet OS or HP’s webOS and not any Microsoft OS. At least not until Windows 8 with dedicated tablet support is launched. This week Microsoft’s Windows Phone president Andy Lees declared that Microsoft considers the tablet a PC and not a mobile device like a phone. Therefore it will not run Windows Phone. But it will also not run Windows, typically. While the 17 million pieces tablet market was still relatively small in 2010, this year 53/(361+53) = 12.8% of all PCs will be a tablet of which the very large majority will not run a Microsoft OS. That means that overall, from a traditional market share of around 90% or more in the PC market, Microsoft might drop to around 80% in one year. According to Microsoft’s definition of a PC…
Windows 8 will have some catch-up to do. Let’s hope they won’t be as successful as Windows Phone 7. Otherwise, it will be slowly game-over for Microsoft.