ReadWriteEnterprise

I am waxing a bit nostalgic this week with various assignments for ReadWriteWeb: the story on PC BIOS, another one on embargo that you will see next week on the site, and seeing Rackspace's history of programming chart takes me back.

Can it be that DOS and I have been involved with each other for 30 years? That sounds about right. DOS has been a hard one to romance, to be sure.

Linux has yet to displace Unix in the data center. Despite Unix server vendor consolidation, most data centers still run multiple flavors of physical Unix servers. That was the take-away from the 2010-11 Unix Vendor Preference Survey of 306 data center professionals conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). GCG has been conducting its Unix surveys for five years, and focuses on physical systems, not virtual machines.

According to a new report from Forrester, Windows 7 is now in use on 20% of corporate desktops as of March 2011. Windows XP still holds on to 59.9% of the enterprise desktop world (down from 67.5% a year go). Apple now has an 11% share of the corporate desktop (up from 9.1%). Linux has only 1.4% (it was 1.3% a year before this study).

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer use is declining slightly while Chrome and Safari are on the rise.

Reports that Apple is now beating Microsoft in market cap, revenue and profit were tempered by one fact: Microsoft has sold more Windows 7 licenses since its release than all iOS products combined during the same period. Whether enterprise or consumer, the Microsoft still own the operating system market. But all that could change.

According to Gartner, OSX and Linux are the fastest growing desktop and server operating systems, respectively. "Among client OSs, Mac OS was the fastest-growing subsegment in 2010 as the unit shipments of Mac desktop/laptop devices saw strong sales, although from a much-smaller basis," the firm reports. Update: Apple's total marketshare, according to Gartner, is still only 1.7% (up from 1.6%), but that's of all OSes including servers. Gartner didn't release numbers broken down by subsegment. Quantcast estimated that 10.9% of Internet users used OSX last year according to Ars Technica.

Last week Hewlett-Packard announced it will be brining WebOS to PCs. In an interivew with the Seattle Times, HP CTO of Personal Systems Phil McKinney says that HP isn't ditching Windows, but will integrate WebOS with Windows. "It will be a combination of taking the existing operating systems and bringing WebOS onto those platforms and making it universal across all of our footprint," McKinney said. "It's not virtualization. It's an integrated WebOS experience we're looking to bring."

Google's vice president for Chrome engineering, Linus Upson, believes that 60% of businesses could immediately switch to Chrome OS and put corporate system administrators out of work. At least that's what The New York Times reported he said, though the paper didn't quote Upson directly. But would YOU want to use Chrome OS for your work?