As you can see, Windows clearly dominates the market with 90 % ofthe market, whereas Linux and Mac each just have slightly above 3 %.This would simply not be enough for a company to justify expensivedriver development, special support groups, separate documentation andall other implications that arise out of supporting a completelydifferent architecture. Naturally UMS is different in this respect, asit doesn´t call for a separate development, but still thetotal numbers as an argument for or against MTP or UMS speak forthemselves. In fact it is only the 15 % Windows 2000 users that wedon´t address if we don´t support UMS, all othersnumbers are clearly negligible. Windows 2000 though never was plannedor positioned as a Multimedia OS and everybody interested in Games,Music, Videos or any other form of entertainment migrated to Windows XP quite early.
Remarkable also is the fact that Windows XP is still growing fasteven 4 years after it´s initial launch and that the upcoming Windows Vista will definitely change the percentage of MTP supportingOSes even more.
What also is worth mentioning here is the fact thatApple´s marketing machinery and the very loud, active andever present Linux community would make us believe that they are muchbigger and especially much more important. But the reality isdifferent.
Digital content distribution is still in it' s infancy and onlyslowly the music industry realises that the internet offers veryconvenient ways of selling music instead of just being the eviltransport medium for illegal copies. More and more shops, services andcommunities open up their business and more and more consumers, thusstimulated from many sides, will move from ripping or downloadingillegally to simply buying their entertainment from the web.