With that commanding market share of "92.52 percent", why is Microsoft so obsessed with destroying Apple? So obsessed they have wasted billions on silly products like Zune, Windows Vista, Windows 7 aka Vista Service Pack whatever and now their ridiculous hamming up of Microsoft Store. Why MS? You own the planet and just about everything else already.

Windows 7 has only been out 9 days - not enough to capture any mindshare of the general public. It is way to early to tell how the market will accept the new operating system.

Why does Microsoft care about a "small" 5% player like Apple?

Because Microsoft leverages Windows as a gateway for selling its other products.

The loss of a sale of Windows OS is very likely a loss of a sale of other Microsoft products, such as MS-Office, Zune, Xbox and WinMobile. The sale of Microsoft products to non-Windows users has been shown to be low.

That's partially why some industry observers were surprised when Microsoft was going to charge $129 for what amounts to a minor upgrade. But in my mind, it's smart: Vista users are already live within the Microsoft marketplace, and Vista is still viable for years to come, despite its shortcomings.

Microsoft cares about Apple because Windows is only attractive in a monopoly situation. They got where they are by maintaining the idea that there are no reasonable alternatives. The existence of a reasonable alternative is death for them, they have to do everything to fight the perception that people do not necessarily need Windows.

a trend make, which you can reasonably extrapolate for the next 5 years...

for Windows PCs when Windows 7 went on sale. Think of all those people that took days full of tedious work to upgrade their systems. I'm sure they were totally focused on merely getting their computers back up and running.

Microsoft definitely won the corporate business world by lack of any competition whatsoever. And of course in part of one IT management Windows guy being able to make the choice for 100,000 employees. That certainly doesn't hurt. I don't doubt that there are consumers that choose Windows because it's a cheaper platform, but in the corporate world, the common drone worker has absolutely no say in the matter.

Windows desktop would rule no matter how bad it was for users. IT cares nothing about end users. They only function to keep whatever is going as long as possible especially if it's easy for them to administrate. Upper management doesn't seem to care either as long as initial costs are kept low. Employees will just be told that nothing can be done about it because there aren't any other practical alternatives.

MS might consider the loss of an OS sale as a loss of a gateway opportunity, but they could avoid that with the Zune by simply producing an OSX client for the Zune. MS Office is on the Mac and it would not be hard for MS to write a client to connect a Mac to the Xbox 360.

I don't know what you are talking about. I was able to install Windows 7 (both academic copies) on my wife's Mac Mini and my PC in a couple of hours. Full days? How about dropping the FUD nonsense.

Are you kidding? There are other variables at play and 9 days of data is not enough to ensure that the results were impacted by any of them. For example, if a large percentage of people ordered the product online on launch day, they would not have received the upgrade until several days later. Furthermore, there are likely substantial people that purchased the product, but did not install it right away. There are just two many variables.

This article makes great assumptions.

The launch of Windows 7 in October did nothing to stop an increase in Mac share online, the latest data from Net Applications shows.

Why would it? Do people in the world stop what they're doing on every OS launch, decide to switch platforms, and go out and now buy a PC?

Although the Microsoft OS was on sale for nine days last month, Windows' combined share of Internet traffic actually dropped to 92.52 percent while Mac OS X profited directly, reaching a new high of 5.27 percent.

Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. For all these people know, all those windows users dumped windows for Linux. And then a bunch of Linux users dumped it for OS X because the Linux forums will filling with a bunch of noobs asking questions above Linux user's smugness level. In that vein, OS X would gain, at best, indirectly.

BTW, Windows lost .25% of its market share. Apple gained .15%. So, technically, some other people are gaining as well. And, if you look at the numbers, some of the gainers are mobile platforms. These aren't a direct competitor or MS. This, in effect, makes MS's loss less significance and Apple's gain more so.

Windows 7 did gain share and represents 2.15 percent, but its gain was more than offset by a full percentage point of Windows users abandoning Windows XP, in many cases opting for the Mac or other platforms.

Wouldn't one think that, more likely, more of those XP users abandoned it for Windows 7, then to jump out and say "Well, they all went to the Mac!". In fact, since all these people do is look at browser usage, how the h*** do they know who jumped from what to what? It is more likely that Vista users jumped to OS X that XP users.