A little cursory research shows that Microsoft sells roughly as many licenses for Windows XP Media Center Edition as Apple does for Mac OS X, on a quarter-by-quarter basis. There's two contradictory but completely predictable ways to spin this information in order to successfully troll people into responding. I'll leave it as an exercise to you to guess what they are.
For what it's worth, I think they're both pretty good operating systems.
I'm Anil Dash, and I've been blogging here since 1999, writing about how culture is made. Contact me at anil@dashes.com, at +1 646 833 8659, or at anildash on Twitter or IM. Find out more »
If you're new to the site, check out my Best Of and Most Popular things I've written in the past 10 years, or explore the full archives. Browse by month or year using the calendar below.
Powered by Hunch.com
| 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | Jan | |
| Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | Feb | |
| Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | Mar | |
| Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | Apr | |
| May | May | May | May | May | May | May | May | May | May | |
| Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | Jun | |
| Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul | Jul |
| Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug | Aug |
| Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep | Sep |
| Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct | Oct |
| Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov | Nov |
| Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec | Dec |
I'm surprised at the number of laptops shipping with Media Center. Seems more like a living room piece of software than a portable DVR, but they still sell.
clearly netbsd is a superior operating system
On the whole, I don't think that there's much of a distinction between Windows XP MCE and Windows XP Home, in terms of the buyer's intent. I believe that most people who end up buying a PC with Windows XP MCE aren't out to buy one -- it just happens to be what's bundled. If I'm right, Windows XP MCE sales volumes are more a reflection of Microsoft's marketing dollars than anything else and comparing Windows XP MCE sales with OS X isn't as interesting. And if I'm wrong, well, then I'm wrong. :-)
Over here (Netherlands) almost every desktop ships with the Windows Media Center edition too so locally we probably have a bit more XP-mc sales.
Compared to MC I would prefer OS X though.