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Comment by DougWebb | Hacker News Reader

The graph is designed to make it appear that the total number of devices is constant, which makes it looks like Microsoft is losing ground. What's actually happened is that the market has grown significantly, considering that their definition of 'market' includes a bunch of platforms that didn't exist a few years ago. That growth didn't happen on MS-based devices, hence the smaller market share.

A less biased visualization would have varying heights of each stack to show the absolute number of devices.

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Actually 2013 and onwards, they see a very solid growth in market share and number of devices for MSFT, and AAPL. They see a significant slow down of the Android train. I wish the analyst writes his name next to Goldman Sachs, because if this holds true he ll be a grand visionary.

Au contraire, I would put around 2016, Windows go down below 10% and 10% for OS/X+iOS. Android would go above 60% and 20% would go to other categories of underdog innovations or rebirths. (Glass computing, ChromeOS, Tizen/Bada/Joll/WebOS, FirefoxOS/Ubuntu/KDE/Linuxes, Card-size computing/Rasperry PI etc, and finally YC-accelerated HW innovations.

The article specifically talks about the "global computing market" ... So it's referring to market share, not number of devices. Nothing misleading here.

Still, the article says "Microsoft is in danger of becoming a small player in today's global computing market". Which is not backed up by the data provided by the article. Unless we have the raw numbers, it could well be that Microsoft has been growing.

The fact that the total share of MS has been shrinking doesn't necessarily mean that MS is a small player in the global market.

"The fact that the total share of MS has been shrinking doesn't necessarily mean that MS is a small player in the global market."

That depends on the context. If you are trying to decide which OS to develop your software for, market share (with some adjustment for the willingness of users of a certain OS to actually pay money for software) is the critical factor. While Microsoft may still be large in terms of number of installations or dollars, losing on market share is significant. In the past, most software was developed for Windows first, and then OSX or Linux if the developer got around to it, which gave Windows a huge advantage in the market regardless of whether or not it was the best from a technological standpoint. Also, market share allowed Microsoft to essentially dictate "standards" (remember all of those websites that required ActiveX?). Microsoft may still be big and wealthy, but losing on market share really does change things -- it makes them "small" in a sense.

If you're a developer trying to decide which OS to develop your software on, and market share is a significant factor in your decision, you're going to choose something cross-platform. That's most likely web, but even if you choose one of the toolkits your choice is going to impact all of the OS producers equally: their marketshare will not be impacted at all by you, unless they actively inhibit cross-platform development on their OS. MS used to do that but not anymore; Apple tries to keep the wall around their garden but they don't block cross-platform completely.

While this is technically correct, what IS misleading is not incorporating significant changes to the market itself. The "market" in that chart starts off before the mobile revolution, and proceeds to include the mobile market as time progresses without properly depicting that significant and extremely relevant factor.

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