The way to tell if a particular analysis of Microsoft's performance is baseless is the complete omission of the enterprise division in the analysis.
Here are revenues by division:
>Windows Division: 1.09 billion profit on $4.411 billion in revenue
>Servers and Tools: $2.33 billion profit on $5.502 billion in revenue
>Online Services: $372 million loss on $800 million in revenue
>Business Division: $4.87 billion profit on $7.231 billion in revenue
>Entertainment and Devices: $110 million loss on $1.915 billion in revenue
The Server & Tools revenue grew 11% just in the last quarter. The writer may dismiss this with a counter argument, but not even acknowledging its presence shows that the writer is extremely shortsighted and only wants to talk about iPhones/iPads and casts doubts on the rest of the "analysis".
Also, this line from that article is very interesting and almost prescient, given that it was in 2005 and the events that transpired since then making every claim below true.
>Cnet reported that some analysts fear it is becoming a great risk to privacy, because it would be a tempting target for hackers, "zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics," the article said.
"Indeed, a recent online survey by a search strategies company found that nearly half of searchers did not recognize top ads as
distinct from natural search results and said the background shading used to distinguish the ads
was white."
> Frankly I think they do just enough to distinguish what are ads and what are search results. The reason most visitors can't tell the difference is because they don't care to learn the difference and they are accustomed to get what they want when they click on the first result.
The contrast can vary depending on the monitor, lighting and age of the monitor and user.
>What do you reasonably expect them to do? Popup a message that says "this is an ad, are you sure you want to click on this link"?
They could add a border around the ad section and/or restore the colors they used a few years back. But that would cut into ad revenue and the new colors must have been carefully A/B tested to provide the most ad clicks.
This in turn forces sites among the top organic results to advertize, since competitors who advertize get more clicks because of the confusing layout of the ads.
> Maybe you are butt-hurt that your site is not ranked how you would have liked.
Please try to keep these kinds of personal attacks off HN(this goes to the other commenter bsullivan in this thread too).
So it depends on what your definition of "popular browser" is. Is it the browser that's used by most people? That would be IE. Is it the browser that most browsing happens? That would be Chrome. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that both Statcounter and Netmarketshare are not perfect and don't cover all or even most sites' logs.
As others have noted, W3schools only measures hits to the W3Schools site, which is not even close to be being representative of the web.