Microsoft is still the biggest company for PC operating systems, at least according to the amount of revenue it generates. A new study from Gartner Research reports that Microsoft had $23.848 billion in revenue from its OS business in 2010 which gave it a 78.6 percent share of the entire worldwide OS market for that year.
Overall, Gartner said in its press release earlier this week that worldwide revenue for OS software came in at $30.4 billion, which was an increase of 7.8 percent compared to 2009. While Microsoft still has a commanding lead in OS revenue, the report did say that Apple"s Mac OS was the fastest growing in revenue in 2010 in terms of the client based OS business. The Mac OS grew by 15.8 percent that year and with revenues of $580 million. Even with that growth the Mac OS only has a 1.7 percent market share of the Client based OS systems. Overall the client OS section of the business grew by 9.3 percent in 2010 while server based OSs grew its revenue by 5.7 percent.
IBM and HP were the number two and three companies in worldwide OS revenue, respectively, in 2010. IBM owns three OSs and showed the highest growth with its AIX OS with 9.2 percent growth. HP"s HP-UX OS shows a 3.2 percent growth in 2010. Red Hat"s version of Linux is the biggest in the overall Linux server market. Its revenues went up to $592 million in 2010, an 18.2 percent growth and a whopping 58.2 percent share of the entire Linux server OS market.