CNN had a story yesterday showing gains in Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) market share in operating systems. The recent gains in market share must be hard for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to ignore. It also has to make life harder for Linux and other O/S makers.

The data released yesterday, showed that the MacIntel systems had a 4.01% share in December and the Mac OS share was 3.28%, making it a combined 7.3% share in December. While the data shows that Microsoft still dominates with a 91.8% market share, it also shows that it has lost ground for seven of the last eleven months. What is interesting is that out of this 91.8% market share for various Windows O/S sales is that 76.97% is still windows XP and only 10.43% is for Windows Vista.

CNN's story covers a survey from Net Applications that uses a sample of visitors to some 40,000 websites operated by its clients rather than a total number of computer systems sold. So there is still some room for interpretation here.

Linux was shown as having a 0.63% market share. While that is up 10.5% from the previous 0.57% readings, it shows that Mac truly is the envy of Linux creators. It is also interesting that, at least according to this survey, much of the Windows sales might still be going into Windows XP rather than Windows Vista.