I use mint along with google to track my traffic to wetwired.  One thing can be said about wetwired’s demographic: It’s very large.  Not that we get a ton of traffic, by large I mean we have technical people that come here for tutorials and we have people who live in Austin come to see the articles written about the local scene, and we have people who come here to read up on our political commentary.   We’re not niche on one subject, which is also our downfall in some cases but that’s not what we’re about - we have multiple interests and they span multiple subjects, wetwired is a group personal blog so to speak.  So coming back to the subject, based on our traffic spanning multiple demographics, here is something that you most likely already knew.

Out of our platform specific traffic, 73% of our traffic is Microsoft Windows based.  Out of that traffic 51% is Windows XP while only 19% is Vista.  On the other hand, Apple based traffic 14% is Leopard vs 6% Tiger.

So we can look at these statistics and do what all people do with numbers - we can make an assumption.  My assumption is that based on this: more than 50% of users have not upgraded to the latest platform Microsoft has provided which is nearing 2 years of being on the market.  Where as Apple’s Leopard 10.5 has been on the market for less than a year (a year in October) and has more than 50% of its users that have upgraded to the latest version.

What does this mean?  It means two things: users have less faith in Microsoft’s product releases than they do in Apple products.  BUT.  Before you wankers jump ahead of me, you also have to look at the adoption rate and user type, the majority of licensed uses that are utilizing XP are businesses as they are always the slowest to adopt.  Apple is slowing coming into the business world so things are changing but, currently the demographics for Leopard vs. Vista are totally different.  Even said,  it’s a pretty good assumption that with each release of the current platform of Apple OS 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 that they are building on pretty solid footing and while there are bugs, users are more comfortable(in general) and trusting (on the whole) of Apple’s bugs than they are of Microsoft’s. Proof in point is wetwired’s traffic.  Of the people who are Apple users and of the people who are Windows users, more of the base of Apple has upgraded vs More of the base of Windows has stayed the same or downgraded.

What to take from this, Apple is breaking into the business world more and more.  Microsoft has it’s work cut out for it, flashy commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates showing them trying to get in touch with the common man is not going to help, nor is the Mojave commercials (honestly all I can see during these commercials is Rick Moranis in Space Balls saying “foooooled yooou”).  Coming out with a reliable OS that is not bloatware will help you.