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Mac OS leads operating systems sales boom

But Windows still the most popular PC OS
Written by Nick Heath, Contributor

But Windows still the most popular PC OS

Apple

Apple can take heart from the fact that the Mac was the fastest growing client OS in 2010Photo: Tim Ferguson/silicon.com

Apple's Mac OS and the Linux operating system grew faster than any other OS in 2010, according to figures from analyst house Gartner.

Strong sales of Apple Mac desktops and laptops saw the revenue generated by sales of the Mac OS grow to $520m in 2010, a rise of 15.8 per cent from 2009.

The report attributes the success of Mac OS to Apple marketing its product line as "cool" computing devices, and the knock-on effect of the success of its mobile products, such as the iPhone and iPad.

But despite the rapid pace at which the Mac user base grew, the revenue generated by Mac sales in 2010 still only accounted for 1.7 per cent of the $30.4bn value of the overall OS market.

While Mac was the fastest growing client OS, Linux was the most rapidly expanding OS on servers, as end users adopted "more open-standard systems", according to Gartner analysts.

The commercial Linux server market was dominated by Red Hat in 2010, with the open source software vendor's revenues rising to $592m and accounting for 58.2 per cent of the Linux server market value.

Unsurprisingly Microsoft continued to hold the largest share of the worldwide OS software market, with its OSes accounting for a 78.6 per cent share and generating $23.8bn-worth of revenue in 2010.

Windows was still the most popular client OS, with high single-digit growth, driven largely by adoption of Windows 7 as the end of official support for Windows XP approaches in 2014.

Worldwide OS revenue grew 7.8 per cent between 2009 and 2010, according to Gartner.

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