Royal Pingdom has posted the results of a short study that looked at the availability of the software update services for three popular operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu.
Pingdom"s uptime monitoring service performed a test once every five minutes and if downtime was found, it was confirmed from two different locations and was counted for however long it lasted. The results were then tabulated in a graph:
Microsoft won with 100 percent availability (0 minutes of downtime), Apple came in second with 99.9 percent availability (2 hours and 34 minutes of downtime), and Ubuntu came in last with 98.64 percent availability (1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes of downtime). Microsoft doesn"t have much to be proud of, as it"s the biggest of the three, and it"s no surprise it took first place. Apple"s 99.9 percent is also quite respectable.