3aIT Blog

Evidence of a massive change in the technology we use was released the other day. For the first time in measured history, something other than Microsoft's Windows operating system registered as the most popular operating system used to access the internet.

According to StatCounter, their stats for March showed 37.93% of users accessing the internet with Android, and 37.91% accessing it with Windows. Apple's iOS was a distant 3rd at 13.09%.

This suggests (perhaps unsurprisingly) that people increasingly choose to access the internet with mobile devices rather than desktop machines. So while internet use from desktop machines is still overwhelmingly from Windows (84%), desktops are now a much smaller percentage of the overall usage.

This will be particuarly bad news for Microsoft. While Apple's stats above are relatively modest, they have successful products in both the desktop and mobile markets. Despite their best efforts, Microsoft only really exist on the desktop. While there is a range of Windows mobile devices, these are still not selling at all. Maybe the unified Windows 10 operating system will change this. Being able to work on your desktop and then pick up your phone and have instant access to all the same data using the same interface seems appealing (and probably a large part of the reason they gave away the desktop version for free). After multiple failed attempts at trying to entice mobile users away from Android and Apple, the smart money would bet against them succeeding this time.