Image via Wikipedia

According to Don Reisinger, the writer of The Digital Home column over at cnet has written about a study by the web advertising company Chitika that says that traffic from Windows 98 is still greater the the traffic seen coming from Windows Phone 7 devices.

According to their statistics, Windows 98 (probably still my favorite OS of all time) still has 0.04% OS marketshare but makes up a mere  0.019% of internet traffic.  Windows Phone 7 on the other hand, has only managed to achieve 0.01% of internet traffic marketshare, barely half of what Windows 98 is still generating.  For a slightly better comparison, it has .44% of the internet traffic when compared to the combined forces of the iPhone and Android.  I knew Windows Phone 7 was slow out of the gate but to be that far behind Windows 98 feels a little embarrassing, especially considering the number of Windows Phone 7 devices that are on the market.

Hopefully things will improve for the impressive mobile OS in the near future but I think it is going to have to be on more carriers like Verizon and Sprint before we see any major uptick in adoption although the iPhone coming to Verizon likely isn’t going to help matters.

Last week at CES, Steve Ballmer said the company had signed up 20,000 developers (myself included) for the mobile platform but I am worried that there is a lot of wasted developer effort for making apps on a platform with such a small share of the market that seems to be having a very difficult time gaining traction.  I am really starting to doubt if the platform can have success in the consumer space as a phone OS.  Apps help build the phone but when the competition is so well established and already has hundreds of thousands of apps, it is going to be very difficult to gain any traction in the market.

Do you think Windows Phone 7 has a bright future or are dark clouds ahead for Microsoft’s latest mobile OS?