Net Applications is reporting, from the statistics it gathers, that Linux has risen above a 1% market share on client devices. Net Applications collects data from the browsers of 160 million visitors to a variety of web sites over the course of a month. The data is then corrected in various ways against bias to provide stats on everything from client OS usage to browser usage. The May 1st, 2009, figures provide the following picture:

This doesn’t seem particularly dramatic for Linux until you look at figures for 2 years ago from the same source which show:

How To Interpret This

The OS X figures are to some extent an old story here. OS X had already broken the Windows monopoly  2 years ago, it’s just that no-one quite believed it at the time, except those who were following the figures. The breaking of the Windows monopoly occurred with Apple’s move to Intel and the release of virtual machine software on OS X. The barriers to migration were minimal and most of those who moved immediately recognized the OS X environment as significantly better than Windows.

A 1% market share doesn’t feel like a revolutionary change, and it isn’t in that sense. It’s a milestone; that’s all. But look at the graph below of Linux market share (as measured by Net Applications). What you are looking at is the graph of the Netbook. Linux market share started to break out at exactly the point where ASUS introduced the first Netbook. If you’re confused by the sudden dip in share in November of last year, I can’t be sure, but the unevenness there may have had  something to do with the stock market crash. In any event the trend passed through this unevenness to the other side.

You are looking at a market share increase  of 63% in the last year (from .63% to 1.02%) and 46% in the previous year. Here’s the skinny:

Linux has broken out from a flat market share and has started to exhibit growth rates similar to those of that Apple showed when it broke through the Windows monopoly.

Don’t be fooled by small percentages here either. 1.02% of the PC market equates to millions of PCs. But more importantly, Linux has established a significant share of the Netbook market and it’s something that Microsoft cannot effectively block. This breakthrough is likely to be reinforced by release of even cheaper Netbooks running Google Android on ARM cpus or other versions of Linux.

Windows doesn’t run on the ARM cpu. The low end of the Netbook market is likely to become Windowless and in those circumstances, Linux market share will just grow.