Microsoft"s domination of the client operating systems market will fade over the next few years, according to Avneesh Saxena, vice-president for Asia-Pacific computing systems research at IDC. Microsoft currently has around 90 percent share of the client operating system market with Windows but this will fall to 58 percent by 2007 as new devices increasingly appear, Saxena said at the IDC Directions conference in Singapore this week.
"Operating systems are not going away and we"re not going to one single platform," he says. "Different workloads require different operating systems and the range of new devices will cause Microsoft"s market share to fall." By 2007, Windows on PCs will account for 58 percent of the client operating system market, with the Symbian OS for communication devices taking 17 percent, according to IDC figures.