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The dup article touts Microsoft's US PC sales once again, overlooking the fact that Microsoft's miserable 600k worldwide PC sales are less than one sixth of Acer's worldwide PC sales. WTF.

With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project". Looks like the spin department is desperately feeding the media to try to keep it on life support.

Wait, what? From the Gartner link which generated this /. post, Apple's US sales were 2,189,000 units in Q3 2017, and 2,022,000 units in Q3 2018. Apple's worldwide sales were 5,385,000 units and 4,928,000 units for Q3 2017 and Q3 2018, respectively. That's not an 18% increase, that's about an 8% drop in each case.

What should be news is not just that Microsoft has exploded on the scene in the US, but that Lenovo is simply crushing it worldwide (up nearly 11%) and in the US (up over 22%).

It's California, where being a successful corporation is a crime unles you produce Hipster products like Apple.

Funny how Samsung wasn't even a successful phone company until they copied Apple's phones.

That is entirely incorrect. Samsung was making cell phones several years before Apple had released any phones at all. They were the third largest manufacturer in 2005 and 2006, and in 2007 they passed Motorola for second (Nokia was still way ahead of everyone else at the time).

And who still thinks that desktop computers are dying?

The same people reporting this? Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 2 Percent in 4Q17 and 2.8 Percent for the Year. And unlike this report, that's been going on for years.

No idea why this troll is at +3, maybe the /. echo chamber have heard this crap so many times they believe it. Read the headlines for Market Share Analysis: Server Operating Systems, Worldwide, 2016 with highlights like "Linux (Server) Is the Fastest-Growing OS Segment" and "Red Hat Became the Second-Largest OS Vendor Through Linux (Server) Growth and Geographical Expansion". The major players are Windows, z/OS, HP-UX and Solaris with Canonical getting a honorable mention. BSD is not on anybody's radar except the systemd trolls.

As for the desktop Linux has never had any significant market share so you can't lose what you never had. But by just about any possible metric BSD is worse, so the same ~1% that's been running it for the last 15 years because it's the only semi-usable open source desktop will continue to do so. As for mobile that's almost entirely up to Google, but they got a winning team with the Linux kernel here. Maybe Fuchsia is an interesting technology testbed but I fail to see the business case for switching. It's well hidden but eh, less hidden than the BSD heritage in iOS/macOS. As far as I know the Darwin kernel isn't usable anywhere else, while Google's kernel is just a few patches from mainline.

First of all, the table that ZDNet has in TFA is outdated from the newest table available on Gartner's actual website:

https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3560517

The PC numbers on Gartner's website look more rosy for the PC than the ones in ZDNet's article. Also, here is an important snippet from Gartner's website that ZDNet conveniently did not include in their screenshot:

Note: The Ultramobile (Premium) category includes devices such as Microsoft Windows 10 Intel x86 products and Apple MacBook Air.

The Ultramobile (Premium) category is growing 11% this year. I would count x86 devices running Win10 or macOS as part of the PC market. Combine the "Traditional PC" category with the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category and suddenly the PC market looks flat in total volume shipments year over year. Combine that with the fact that the average selling price for the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category is probably higher than the stuff they count as "Traditional PC" and 2017 is actually looking like a pretty good year for PC OEMs.

A better headline would be "Cheap glossy plastic laptops decline, thin and light metal body laptops on the rise."

Yes, systemd homogenizes Linux... Down to the level of utter, absolutely unstable crap like Windows.

Compared to the situation of Linux, with not "half a dozen BSD", but litterally HUNDREDS of distributions, I am not sure you are being serious...

Well now I'm confused because you're talking in circles. Additionally, if you're sitting there saying there's only three BSD but hundreds of Linux distros then you might as well toss in the towel on your argument. Only three BSDs, pfft. Okay, so you're willing to say Dragonfly BSD is just FreeBSD, but that same thinking doesn't hold water with something like CentOS is just RedHat? If you seriously think there's 100s of distros, I'll give you that, but you're going to have to abandon your idea of only three BSDs. Otherwise, you're just skirting facts to wax your ego.

Hilarious. Try getting actual, useful support from Red Hat and SuSE, to name just two of the biggest... Go on, I'll be waiting right here.

I've never had a problem with RedHat support. Of course, I don't call them and act like an asshat.

The level of incompetence in these companies is simply astounding.

Yes, which is why they're making money. Again, please refer to my "Slashdot users like to use dated examples that aren't in line with reality" point that I made in my previous post. You might as well convince me that Java is slow as dirt since v1.2 was so horrible and obviously no one can improve software. Or something like JavaScript couldn't possibly be used for serious software development. Or webapps suck compared to full desktop applications.

I could go on refuting your ridiculous arguments again and again

Wow, way to not act like the very stereotype I was referring to. I mean what with the whole inflated ego, I'm so much smarter than you I don't have time to even type things on a keyboard that's how beneath me your are... The, I know so much about AWS, let me demonstrate what words you are using incorrectly. I mean do you tell people who call it toilet paper, "NO!! IT IS CALLED TOILET TISSUE!!!"? You must be a peach to work with and I know, because I've worked with similar folks like yourself that spray themselves daily with eau de superiority. Just something about the IT field draws the folks with superiority complexes for some reason.

Actually, no, systemd IS the reason serious system administrators and quite a few devops are leaving Linux behind.

Well I'm guessing that number of people leaving Linux includes you and maybe a few of your buddies, wunderbar. So now that we've got that out of the way,
care to back that up at all with actual numbers? Are we just going to go ahead and assume your big brain knows better? It's not a chore to see that Linux adoption has pretty much been the same as it has been the last five or so years, that the number of jobs that ask for Linux skillset hasn't changed, that pretty much this massive decline that you speak of, it just isn't happening. Oh here's something for you, but by all means, feel free to put whatever you've got here (I mean only if the almighty has time to mingle with us simpletons of course) and don't let me try to convince you of anything. I'm so sure your opinion is way more accurate than market analysis, because, well you know.

Your level of ignorance is frankly stunning.

Sticks and stones buddy. However, I find your breed fun at a distance. Something about the blatant display of hyper-amped egos and the sheer level of tunnel vision is amazing. It is stunning really. Just one question, when you wake up are you able to see anything outside of the three degrees of your field of vision that's

Intel's problem is that they have already cut their losses and ran from the invasion of phone/tablet products. It's the 11th straight quarter of declining PC shipments. Meanwhile smartphone sales are up again now outselling PCs at a rate well over 5:1. Tablet sales are also down (Q1 numbers) so you might say Microsoft has managed to shore up the convertible/laptop market with the Surface line, but WinTel is completely on the sidelines in the global smartphone revolution. According to the platform statistics 53% of all Internet access is now mobile, 42% PC, 5% tablets.

Intel is not in trouble, they have the server market and so far AMD's offering is basically a return to competition, it's a long way to go until Intel is on the ropes fighting for survival. But they and Microsoft completely failed to bring out a good x86 smartphone leveraging the tons of existing win32 code, I don't know why. I mean all the alarm bells should have gone off when the iPhone became a success in 2007, even with 3-4 years development time they should be ready to kick ass around 2011 but instead we got the Nokia flop. Considering the power of phones relative to typical office applications I'm kinda waiting for the phone with a cheap dock that gives you charging, display, keyboard, mouse, a chromebook-like UI and a bluetooth headset in case you need to answer the phone while docked. Like if you already have a phone and a TV, add these accessories and you won't need a laptop.

From: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo... Smartphones are expensive for users in India, but with the average selling prices (ASPs) of low-end models falling, Gartner estimates that 139 million smartphones will be sold in India in 2016, growing 29.5 percent year over year

How many of these silly articles are going to be based on Adobe press releases?

And when/how did Adobe manage to convince anyhow that they're some sort of authority on web-based shopping metrics, anyhow? Are they running Amazon's backend or something?

They offer a web content management product - one of the better ones if you trust Gartner reports:
https://www.gartner.com/doc/re...

Their Marketing Cloud offering accounted for a little over 25% of their total revenue last year - $1.3 billion total:
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/con...

And if you trust Gartner reports - they are a leader on several of the magic quadrants charts. So yeah - they do know what they are talking about and they have data to back it up. However, I agree with parent, take with a grain of salt and look for other sources that are not biased in their reporting.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Adobe - I work for one of their competitors in this area.

Looks like Samsung about doubles Apple's smartphone sales.

Sorry, I take facts over your handwaving and rantings.

http://www.gartner.com/newsroo...

Q2 2014:
Android: 243,484k units, 83.8%
iOS: 35,345k units, 12.2%

IOW Apple has a higher marketshare Q2 2016 than Q2 2014. Apple is domed!

If only they had sold 10 million less phones in Q2 2015, there'd be a nice steady growth in marketshare, but no, they had to doom themselves by being so successful last year.

If only Americans knew how much of their financial institutions still ran on COBOL, and the outrage that would ensue... ... but seriously, come on. These stories are nothing new, and they'll continue for decades. IT projects are always looked at with a sense of dollars - with band aids being particularly cheap.

Given the 20-28% failure rate of IT projects.... http://my.gartner.com/portal/s...

According to the stats (direct link: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo...), Windows share fell by 1.8% across a single quarter. However, iOS's share fell by an even greater amount: 3.1%. Android's share increased by 5.3%. This could be because of a new market coming online, or China or India's growth in smartphone purchases (which would consist mostly of low-end Android phones).

The important statistic is the percentage in North America, which is responsible for the vast, vast percentage of app purchases. iOS share continues to grow in the USA, with Android and Windows staying fairly flat. iOS seemed to gobble up nearly every bit of Blackberry market as that platform diminished, which is how it grew while the others stayed flat. (source: http://www.statista.com/statis...)

They are so hilariously wrong so often you could build a successful career out of assuming they will be wrong about everything. A selection of their idiocies:

• Apple Should License the Mac to Dell
• Windows Phone to beat iPhone by 2015 (thanks to Nokia)
• Why does the IT industry continue to listen to Gartner?

Apple now has 20% of the market and 90% of the profits. Measuring units is a bit like counting songs published on Spotify while ignoring the number of plays. For both those numbers to be true Apple must be making about 40 times more profit per sale than Android.

If you actually look at the Gartner report the TechCrunch is based upon you'll see TC sort of dropped the ball here. While it's true that worldwide PC sales are up 1% 4Q14 vs 4Q13, year over year sales figures show PC sales total for the year down 0.2%. What the numbers actually say is the PC market would be far worse off if it hadn't been for a slew of super cheap Windows tablets (counted by Gartner as PC sales) and laptops sold around the holidays. These sales have only come from Microsoft and Intel basically subsidizing the PC market to provide some sort of down market competition to Android and iOS tablets.

If you look at IDC's numbers covering the same time period you've got a YoY drop of 2.1% worldwide. IDC does not count things like the HP Stream 7 or the Surface Pro as a PC in their reporting. However IDC counts Chromebooks as PCs where Gartner does not.

No matter what numbers you look at the PC market is seeing declining sales worldwide. Even if you believe the Gartner growth numbers for 4Q14, they're still a full 4% lower than 4Q12. It looks even worse if you compare the numbers to 2011 or 2010.

It's not a story about traditional PCs vs tablets. The real interesting story is smart phones vs everything else. A smart phone (unlike a PC) is useful for pretty much every demographic in mature and emerging markets. They are where the future growth is going to be. That's not to say the PC is going to disappear but I doubt the market will ever see growth like 2000-2010 and likely will never see another peak like that of 2010.

Being #1 in a rapidly-expanding market is a huge advantage due to the "network effect" - people buy what the people around them buy.

The writing was starkly on the wall last year when their sales didn't put them in the top 10. Going from #1 to being lumped in with "Other" == "yuck".

And there's a big difference between "subscriber base", which is accumulated over years, and "annual sales."

Yeah, nobody buys PC's, that's why there were 76M shipped in Q2...
Granted, it's less than the 240M smartphones sold in the same quarter, but PC's have never shipped in much higher quantity then they did last quarter.

Do Gartner reports actually have any use? I mean, they put a nice graphic to their "hype cycle", but this is surely stuff that any technical type over the age of 25 understands?

You can purchase their report on the Internet of Things for the low, low price of $1995. If it's like most Gartner reports that I have seen, it will contain nice references to certain companies - my suspicion is that these companies have recently given Gartner fat consulting contracts. If you watch the same report evolve year-to-year, recommended companies change randomly - from a technical perspective - so one presumes that the deciding factors are politics and/or money.

Anyone want to argue against my cynicism? Are Gartner reports actually useful to some people?

Looks like dodgy statistics to me, they also have Apple at 6% when a much better known market research company says Apple' sales market share is 13.7% (source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo...).

Android is on pace to surpass one billion users across all devices in 2014. By 2017, over 75 percent of Android's volumes will come from emerging markets. Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo...

Um, you do realize that while the ios market share isn't as high as Android's, Apple actually sells more smartphone handsets than any manufacturer besides Samsung? So yeah, according to your logic Pepsi should just pack it up because they are #2 to Coke. No point in continuing on.

Yes, a paltry 5% of the one billion cell phones sold in 2013.

5% of 1B...let's see...carry the knot...I make it a truly pathetic 50,000,000 units sold. Insignificant indeed. Especially when you compare it to the gargantuan sales of personal computers in 2013 (82M units). No comparison at all.

My last three laptops cost about $300 each. Last cell phone (Nexus 5) cost $400. No comparison there either.

Half the Android tablets sold came from Samsung, ASUS, Amazon, and Lenovo. Those are not low-end, disposable products. The high end of Android tablets sells as well as iOS. Android just benefits from also having lower end products in the mix as well - which allows Android to double the volume of iOS.

Half the Android tablets sold came from Samsung, ASUS, Amazon, and Lenovo. I don't think they sell low-end tablets... It's not the price that is driving Android to double-up on iOS; it's a natural extension of Android dominating the cell phone world. If you have an Android phone, the natural OS to consider for a tablet is Android - you already know it, you have the apps. Since Android doubled up on iOS in terms of market share, it's only natural for tablets to end up the same way.

If you trust Gartner's numbers, Lenovo's absolute sales increased by about 6% year-over-year. This increased their market share from 16% to 18% because the rest of the PC industry is shrinking. So Lenovo is continuing to grow the PC business. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, of course, since Gartner is not always completely reliable.

So much stupidity in your post.

I don't know what the vast majority of Android users are doing, but it certainly isn't contributing to the ecosystem

You mean Android users aren't acting like entitled ass wipes and buying overpriced crap like people do on overpriced iPhones?

It would be more like Mac and PCs, except it appears the vast majority of PCs were used only to play Solitaire as their sole function - leaving the few Mac users being ones to actually use their computers.

You drink a lot of apple flavored koolaid if you believe that garbage. If I don't use my Android to waste bandwidth and purchase crap on the web, then I'm not actually using it?

The reality is that a lot of iPhones are purchased by easily manipulated suckers, and they are easily parted from their money through a steady diet of consumer drivel marketing.

Of course, given that most Androids are crap-droids that people are buying to replace their featurephones

Figures from Gartner indicate that in Q3 2013, Android accounted for nearly 82% of all smartphone sales in the period.

Don't worry though! Apple had 12.1% of smartphones--or 30 million devices compared to 205 Million Android smartphones. And those are SMARTPHONES, not feature phones--Android sold nearly another 100 Million feature phones as well.

Even Samsung's flagship phones barely crack 10% of the Android market, and Samsung owns about 90% of the Android phones out there, so for every S4, they sell 8 other "budget class" Android phones

Completely incorrect. Samsung's S4/Notes sold nearly 90 Million units last year alone--equal to Apple's sales of iPhone 5c and 5s. And Samsung is only approximately 40% of the Android market.

You just don't know what you are talking about.

What I am saying that Nokia's collapse was not due to the adoption of WP, it was due to the fact the market changed and Nokia was not prepared. WP affected how it collapsed but it was not the reason why it collapsed.

Nokia were left with a portfolio of products that still had sales momentum, but sales were declining and would continue to decline unless they released a viable competitor. Maybe Meego could have worked, we'll never know now, Ahonen aside, there are enough ex-Nokia voices saying that the whole internal management at Nokia was horribly broken and they were never going to produce a viable platform in time.

The point is Elop couldn't do nothing. Choosing WP certainly brought on the decline much more rapidly than the lingering death Nokia would probably have suffered, but Nokia now has a modern portfolio of smartphone products that are increasing rapidly in popularity and their overall sales are second only to Samsung as shown by Table 3 here

Hi I think the following blog post explains the "vision" behind XenDesktop 7: http://blogs.gartner.com/gunnar-berger/xendesktop-7-is-xenapp-7-the-missing-ingredient-at-citrix-synergy/ anyway it's a complete revolution for a XenApp infrastructure: I think the transition will be very slow for existing farms!

Nokia Q2 2013 mobile market share was a bit over 14%.

Wrong. Android and iOS have 93.2% of the global market share.

Yeah, "more than doubled" to 3.3%!!!

In the smartphone operating system (OS) market (see Table 2), Microsoft took over BlackBerry for the first time, taking the No. 3 spot with 3.3 percent market share in the second quarter of 2013. “While Microsoft has managed to increase share and volume in the quarter, Microsoft should continue to focus on growing interest from app developers to help grow its appeal among users,” said Mr. Gupta. Android continued to increase its lead, garnering 79 percent of the market in the second quarter.

OMG!!!!

"They were more successful than just about any other smart phone. " - In fact, they were dominant with 62% market in PDA/smartphone http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/506328 I used SDA back then and people are already looking for 'smart' features like web browse, email....etc. That SDA is total crap. In fact it is trying to be a mini windows machine.

I think when PC sales worldwide drop by large percentages and and Apples dropped by fewer than the overall trend, then that is actually resulting in a larger market share for Apple overall. Just saying ... that is what the actual numbers would seem to indicate.

Except actual numbers say no such thing :). Mac is down 2%; 22% and 5% YonY more by quarter. http://investor.apple.com/ PC sales show a drop of about 10% https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2544115 ...basically mac sales are if anything dropping faster. Just Saying you should check your figures.

Except that there's no evidence that that's the direction things are headed in. Samsung isn't gaining market share at Apple's expense—it's gaining market share at the expense of all the other players in the market, and by expanding the market to new customers on the low end.

Dan Aris

I think you just contradicted yourself. Yes, Android is gaining global market share, largely due to it's dominance in countries like China -- that was my point, and it seems you agree. If this plays out as it has been (Android gaining a few percentage points of market share each quarter), and looking at the global picture (i.e. the billions in the developing world who will upgrade from their dumbphone to a cheap Android smartphone) things are definitely moving in the direction of iPhones having only 10% of the global smartphone market share. For evidence, according to Gartner, the iPhone had 9% market share of all mobile phone (smart and dumb phone) sales in the first quarter of 2013. Of global smartphone market it share, it dropped from 22.5% to 18.2% in the course of a year (Q1 2012 to Q2 2013), and in that same time, Android increased from 56.9% to 74.4% smartphone market share.

The point, in case it wasn't clear, is that in 5-10 years, Apple will have 10% of the smartphone market share (and in 5-10 years, all phones will be smartphones). Looking at the numbers above, it looks more like they'll be lucky to have even that in 5 years.

Riiiiight. They doubled their sales in a year, while Android grew only 1.8 times since Q1 2012!

Just don't look at any other numbers, because it's actually ~5 mil. WP devices sold this year and ~2 millions last year, while Android sales grew 73M - or 1.9% of total sales to 2.9% and 51% to 74%.

The context of the comment was smartphones. How much Apple is making on tablets and computers is separate. Do you have numbers the profitability of Samsung's smartphone business vs. Apple's smartphone business?

I look at data I have. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816

There's also this: the leader in sales is likely to become the leader in profit in not many quarters.

Android Q1 sales are now up to 74% of the market, compared to Apple's 18.2% -- down 4% since last year this time.
Samsung alone has 30.8% of the market. They're increasing their dominance, beating out other Android phone vendors but ALSO taking market share away from Apple.

If I were working for Apple's iPhone business, I'd see Samsung unit sales running away from me and be pretty worried. I remember when smart phone users had to have a Blackberry. I remember when Nokia dominated the mobile phone business. I remember when Motorola dominated the mobile phone business. Where are they now?

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" - Eric Schmidt

You may be interested in the context of that quote.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jeffrey_mann/2009/12/18/googles-eric-schmidt-needs-media-training-not-a-privacy-spanking/

No, that's just incorrect - here are the actual reports.

The IDC report says Mac sales were down 7.5%:

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413#.UWZPFVfJLz9

There is a different report, by Gartner, that says U.S. Mac sales were up 7.4%, but a) that's not the IDC report and b) it's not worldwide data, it's for the U.S. market only:

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2420816

Every $80 smartphone they are selling they lose the sale of a $80 feature phone.

Ok sorry for ignoring your post. It was better when I reread it. The reality is if you argue that the smartphone market is simply the *phone* market as dumbphones are replaced by smartphones. The your right Apple are still growing market share of that pie. Its a weird way of looking at it.

So lets have a look at some current figures for that. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2335616 Now here is the thing..conversion rate Android grew 20% to 70% while iOS lost 2% to 20%. It shows how Apples expansion is slowing, While Android is exploding.

Now your saying they don't matter because they are $80 phones...the average selling price is $150, are you really saying Apple cannot produce a profitable phone at $150...or even one at $80. The reality is Apple have priced themselves out of the world market...and its hurting them, and market share matters.

That's why many Android owners (who aren't on Slashdot) would rather have something else.

...a 2011 propaganda article in 2013. You really should have thought that through. since that article was written 2011Q3 Android has risen 52.5% to 72.4%...Apple on the other hand have lost market share from 15% to 13.9%...not so much following the vibe that time :) http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2237315

Samsung Bada phones cost about 20% less than Samsung Android phones based on equivalent hardware (see the Wave 3 vs the Galaxy S Plus for instance). People who buy phones for their out-of-the-box features might be interested in the saving.

Your report is only for the first quarter of the year and only reports 1.9% growth year-over-year. If you check the subsequent reports that Gartner issued, you'll see that growth was flat in the second quarter and fell more than 8% in the third quarter. Hardly the growth that you're talking about.

That said, Gartner believed third quarter sales were down due to expectation for Windows 8, yet that doesn't seem to be panning out for Microsoft, suggesting that there's a real problem for them.

Your report is only for the first quarter of the year and only reports 1.9% growth year-over-year. If you check the subsequent reports that Gartner issued, you'll see that growth was flat in the second quarter and fell more than 8% in the third quarter. Hardly the growth that you're talking about.

That said, Gartner believed third quarter sales were down due to expectation for Windows 8, yet that doesn't seem to be panning out for Microsoft, suggesting that there's a real problem for them.

Why don't you learn how to drive a crane to work instead of your car... oh, wait - what's that?? You aren't used to it??? What's the MATTER with you, boy!!!

Perfect analogy. Different tools, different use cases....

I can't even begin to comprehend how people can defend Windows 8... unless they are getting paid.

Currently Google is pre-selected as the search engine for iOS devices. We all know Google hardly makes a dime from Android directly - they are an advertising company. Google ironically makes more money from iOS due to the higher usage of iOS devices around the world (and, in turn, more ad impressions).

Can you cite a source for that claim? The numbers Gartner most recently published make that seem extremely unlikely given about 3 times the number of android devices vs iOS. Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2237315

It's no surprise. Generally, companies sell "apps" to make money. As of August, Microsoft and other small fry mobile OS's combined represented a whopping 0.6% of mobile device OS's. What's more, that number has declined by almost 50% from a year ago. Why spend time and money developing for a platform that appears to be dying. Developers will probably wait to see if the current rev MS os can turn that trend around before spending more time and money on the platform.

Source: Gartner

Well, they're all looking at it wrong. When Windows 8 phones are released they're going to dominate the market. Developers would be wise to get on board early.

....nah, I don't believe it either.

It's no surprise. Generally, companies sell "apps" to make money. As of August, Microsoft and other small fry mobile OS's combined represented a whopping 0.6% of mobile device OS's. What's more, that number has declined by almost 50% from a year ago. Why spend time and money developing for a platform that appears to be dying. Developers will probably wait to see if the current rev MS os can turn that trend around before spending more time and money on the platform.

Source: Gartner

the largest PC maker sells PC's without windows.

According to the Gartner report released on October 10, 2012 (8 days ago), Lenovo ousted HP as the largest PC manufacturer in the world in Q3 2012. Lenovo sells PCs without Windows?

I mean you have at best estimates around 3% being actual desktop users (no you aren't allowed to count servers, routers, your CCC Droid phone, because lets face it those won't run the latest Quake engine games) and of those[â¦]

What `best estimates' are you looking at? Most people `guesstimate' that desktop Linux has `less than 1% market-share', but the only `desktop Linux market-share' estimates I've ever seen based on actual sales-stats were more like 8-10%, and that was an under-estimate because it didn't count computers that had Linux installed post-sale (so, it didn't consider, e.g.: the laptops that ship with Windows or Mac OS and then have Linux installed on them).

Even if desktop Linux had only half of that estimated 10%, it'd still be at least on par with Mac OS X--which had less than 5% market-share worldwide) last year.