While it's no major news that Windows dominates the desktop OS market, the
interesting thing is in the version. The winner of Users' Choice award for 2009
is Windows XP, and not Vista, even though the latter has been around for a long
time. XP enjoyed the highest current ownership amongst our respondents, had the
highest top of mind recall, and even the highest loyalty relative to other OS
brands. The top of mind recall for Windows Vista was pretty low at just 5%. On a
relative scale though, Vista enjoyed the highest percentage of other brand
owners shifting in to it.
However, amongst our respondents, the Linux variants didn't have sufficient
votes for us to pass any judgment. Coming back to Windows, XP led the way across
all the industries we covered in our survey this time. Windows Vista however,
was the strongest in the services industry, followed by communication and media
industry as well as the process manufacturing industries.
Windows XP enjoyed the highest brand loyalty amongst its existing owners at
55%. Windows Vista on the other hand, enjoyed only 31% loyal owners, and the
remaining 69% said they were not sure which OS to shift to or had no plans of
shifting. Maybe things will change now that Windows 7 has been launched. Let's
see how well does the new OS fare next year.