For the first time in a very long time indeed, market share of Microsoft’s Windows OS has dropped below 90%, or so says Net Applications Inc who are quoting a figure of 89.6%. On a positive note for the boys in Redmond, however, Vista did finally manage to top 20% last month.

Although it would be pretty safe to assume that Linux’s increasing public acceptance would be the cause for Microsoft’s drop, it turns out that this isn’t the case at all (despite a small amount of growth which almost brings the open source OS up to 1%), with Apple’s own OS X being the surprise darling of the year.

In fact, while Windows’ marketshare has steadily decreased over the past year or so, OS X’s has steadily grown to 8.9%, with forecast healthy Christmas sales expected to bring that figure up a little further still.

Of course, there’s a long way to go until Microsoft are knocked off their perch, but it’s always good to see a little healthy competition in the marketplace – competition which will hopefully inspire Microsoft to really push the boat out with the upcoming Windows 7.

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