Wow… this article is a pretty startling example of distortion–so much so, that I’m pretty sure its author works for the GOP… or Microsoft… or both. Here’s the first paraagrph:

Windows Vista’s share of online users has increased every month this year, while rival Mac OS X — to which Vista has often been compared — has shown little, if any, growth, a metrics company reports.

This is one of those grand lies that uses the truth distorted in several ways to give a completely false impression. Pretty spectacular, if you know what it’s really talking about and how it uses massively different cases and compares them side-to-side as if they were on equal standing. Either this writer is so idiotic and clueless about computers that Computerworld should fire him, or he is dishonest to an astonishing degree… and Computerworld should fire him.

It’s hard to figure out where to start. First off, he’s comparing Windows Vista–Microsoft’s new Windows OS–with all Mac OS versions out there. We all know that Windows has something like 90%+ of the OS market share (exact stats are in dispute, but that’s the general area), while Apple has most of the rest. So any version of Windows will have the potential to gain far more market share than all versions of the Mac OS for that reason alone. It would be like selling accessories for the iPod vs. the Zune: you sell more because the customer base is many times bigger, not because your product is better.

What’s more, Vista use more or less has to grow, since most new PC sales have Vista pre-installed. Vista growth is virtually guaranteed, even despite its massive flaws. Here, I’ll make a startling prediction: in five years, most PC users will be running Vista! What a breathtakingly daring prediction! Of course, this is a no-brainer: in five years, most Windows users will have bought a new Windows computer, and unless they go way out of their way to get XP installed (or switch to a Mac, which more and more are doing), they will be using Vista–but by Hobson’s Choice, not necessarily their own.

In short, the writer compares (1) a new product filling a vast, pre-existing reservoir with (2) an existing product (which not only hasn’t been updated in a few years, but is now waiting for an upgrade in three months, no less–something which dampens sales, if anything) with a much smaller existing user base gaining market share by fighting tooth and nail to convert people from one system to another.

However, there is one reason you can see the writer doing this: it’s the only way to make Vista sales seem strong. Which makes me wonder about how big a kickback this guy is getting from Redmond. There has been ample evidence that Vista adoption has been slow; in fact, so many people asked Dell to sell computers with XP installed that the computer maker started offering it as a regular product. Think about that: scores of new customers demanded that a 6-year-old piece of software be installed on their computers so that they could avoid having a brand-new OS included in their computer, even though the price would be identical.

What’s more, the Computerworld writer uses very specific Mac OS usage stats (as reported by a Windows-centric organization) to make it seem like Mac usage is falling:

Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22 percent in January and hit its high point of 6.46 percent in May, but it slipped back to 6 percent in June.

To see how he played fast and loose with the numbers, look at the chart below, with the figures he quoted circled in red:

Note that the January number was at the high end of a very fast climb for OS X users. Had he quoted stats year-over-year, that is, July 2006 to July 2007, he would have had to admit that Mac OS X use has increased from 4.29% to 6.00%–and that the “slip” he mentioned is a month-to-month variation–a hiccup, not a trend. The year-over-year increase is supported by the fact that Apple continues to outperform the market: sales of Mac computers shot up 26.2% year over year, while the PC market overall only rose 7.2%.

But the numbers that the Vista-friendly writer gave are deceptive in other ways as well. For example, if you just trouble yourself to get the Net Applications numbers for the Mac OS for the previous year as well, you’ll notice a pattern: Mac OS share rises in the second half of the year, then stays steady in the first half of the next year. The numbers for the Mac have shot up starting in August for the past two years–which means that Mac OS share, as reported by this source, should start to jump again in the next few months:

Note that the rise in 2006 was greater and was sustained for longer than the one in 2005. So if the past is any indication, the Mac OS share should make an even bigger jump upwards this coming Autumn. All of this shows exactly the opposite of what the Computerworld writer states, as he used cherry-picked numbers to give a completely false impression.

But as long as we have nice charts made up, let’s take a realistic look at market share. Windows, after all, has 90%+ market share, and Vista is trying to fill in that market. So let’s give Vista a secondary axis on the chart, so it will represent how Vista is filling that reservoir of potential buyers, the Windows customer base:

Not nearly as impressive, is it? Which is why that writer had to completely fudge the numbers to make Vista look like it was doing great, when actually it’s doing pretty lousy, given the built-in advantages it enjoys.