A survey of operating systems carried out by the analysis company Gartner shows that Windows (all versions) accounted for 78.6 percent of global sales of operating systems in 2010.
This is an increase of eight percent compared to the previous year. Although Windows leads by a wide margin, Apple’s OS X is growing almost twice as fast, increasing 15.8 percent last year and accounting for $520 million of total revenue.
According to Gartner, Microsoft’s share could be even greater if it weren’t for the widespread piracy, mainly in China and India.
– We estimate that the number of pirated installations of Windows is around 80 percent in China and 60 percent in India. We believe that Microsoft could increase revenue on Windows by 20 to 25 percent if piracy was not so widespread, says Matthew Cheung at Gartner to Betanews.