Competition analysis on the operating system market using principal component analysis

Operating system market has evolved greatly. The largest software producer in the world, Microsoft, dominates the operating systems segment. With three operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 the company held a market share of 87.54% in January 2011. Over time, open source operating systems have begun to penetrate the market very strongly affecting other manufacturers. Companies such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. penetrated the operating system market. This paper aims to compare the best-selling operating systems on the market in terms of defining characteristics. To this purpose the principal components analysis method was used.