Windows slips to third place on Gartner's latest device forecast

Microsoft's Windows will become a third-place operating system by 2017, research firm Gartner said today.

By then, Apple's combination of iOS and OS X -- the former powering iPhones and iPads, the latter Macs, and the pair increasingly alike in features if not in functionality -- will have slipped by Windows on the number of devices shipped during the year, Gartner's latest forecast showed.

According to Gartner, which provided Computerworld with its forecast broken out by OS, Windows will power about 308 million devices shipped in 2015, a 6% year-over-year decline. The 308 million represents 12.9% of the total of 2.4 billion devices shipped, nearly 80% of that massive number smartphones, and the majority of those smartphones running Google's Android. Gartner's previous forecast, released in July, pegged Windows at 323 million devices, or 13.2% of the total.

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