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I took one look at the statistic and thought: Wtf?

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

0.12% of all devices that access the internet are IPhones? How many did they sell?
0.63% for Linux, which means that only six times as many Linux computers are used to access the internet as IPhones.

About one persent for Linux and about seven for Mac: I would buy that. Sounds reasonable, since many open source guys I know use a Mac for desktop stuff.

But with those numbers for the IPhone the numbers look more like something someone pulled out of their a**. Plus all the computer lab computers at our universities got converted to Linux over the past years. And our university is not Linux friendly in any way. So I imagine that this would happen at many universities and colleges.

Yes, when virtually no one turns out to be 36.84% of all users, or roughly 47.6% of all users using some version of IE (4-7, including pocket), I'd say that no one has moved over. :p

The iPhone doesn't seem to be disappointing to those who actually have one. According to this survey an unprecedented 82% of owners were very satisfied. However I can understand how those who were expecting the Jesus Phone might be bitter. It's not perfect, but it is unprecedented as a pocket internet device. iPhone web usage already exceeds Windows mobile, etc by a wide margin.

The whole "Vista is a flop" is 1/4 disappointment about what it could have been (certainly valid) and 3/4ths plain old FUD and buku profitable ad impressions.

Well, it is more like 7% now: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

Um... no. Please provide a source to your ridiculous claim. Oh wait, you can't. But I have some.

Vista's sales were 60% less than expected (comparing to XP's first week sales in October 2001), and 50% less than predicted by Microsoft. However, 30% of first week sales opted for the $400 Vista Ultimate, bringing the dollar value up to $207.13, 66% up from the initial selling price of XP. It should also be noted that PC sales were up 67% from the same week the previous year, making Vista sales look even worse.

As for actual total desktop market share, that's a tougher thing to measure. Linux users don't have to buy anything, meaning we can't judge them by sales numbers. You can't even look at download stats because the same disk image could be used throughout an organization (I myself have used the same CentOS disk on more than *200* machines). The numbers people quote most often come from advertising statistics, but that has it's own problems, mainly to do with a little something called an ad blocker. In 2002, only about 1-2% of users had adblocking software; in 2004, 21%; in 2006, 53%; and by the end of 2008, 80% are expected to have some form of adblock installed. That means that less than half of people's computers are actually reporting data back to advertisers for these OS market share statistics, with a disproportionate amount using something besides Windows. Meaning that Linux and Mac users are again shown in less than actual percentages.

Anyway, here are the numbers for the month of December 2006 from netapplications.com (the most quoted source):

XP - 85.30%
Mac - 5.67%
Linux - 0.68%
Vista - 0.37%

Other factors to keep in mind concerning advertising statistics are the large and growing number of dual boot and VM configurations, not just Linux-Windows, but Linux-Mac and Mac-Windows and the fact that most advertising statistics are usually limited to one country or even just major cities in a country. Also the fact that these numbers only account for (some) desktop systems, not servers or most embedded devices (of which Linux now boasts 20+% and 49% market share respectively as of April 2007).

Sources:
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011360&intsrc=hm_list
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10&qpmr=24&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qpcal=1&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=95
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7065740528.html

Wow. That ended up WAY longer than I thought it'd be. Sorry. :p

Oh, one last thing. If you go to the second link I gave and look up the stats for last month, you'll see that Vista is already at 9%. Not bad, but not great, either, considering how hard Microsoft's been pushing it for the last year (think about all those stories about retailers selling XP since no one with half a brain tech-wise wants Vista).

last I checked (about a year ago), was still the most wildly used Windows.

Windows "most wildly used" OS a year ago? Windows 2000 had about 5.5% a year ago. Now it has only 3%. Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5

It has been a negligible obsolete system for many years.

Vista is not a total failure, but its not a success either.

8% market share in 9 months (since the Home/Ultimate editions release) sounds like a success to me, rather than anything. Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

I choose to believe that this is a somewhat realistic representation of current market share of Linux.

You can choose to believe in Santa Claus as well, but belief does not imply reality. Your sample size is too small, and skewed towards Linux users. Here is a more realistic view of Linux client market share: 0.81%. Yeah, it's probably a lot larger in the server room, but good luck getting remotely accurate statistics on that.

Depends how you measure success. For myself the fact that Ubuntu increasingly gets better makes it a success. I can understand you have a problem dealing with that because Windows is about world domination and the two ideologies are different.

Also if you check your source again you'll see that Linux is growing.

October, 2006 - 0.39%
November, 2006 - 0.37%
December, 2006 - 0.37%
January, 2007 - 0.35%
February, 2007 - 0.42%
March, 2007 - 0.57%
April, 2007 - 0.80%
May, 2007 - 0.70%
June, 2007 - 0.71%
July, 2007 - 0.75%
August, 2007 - 0.77%
September, 2007- 0.81%

Windows market share: 92%
Linux market share: 0.81%

Yeah linux is *really* successful.

This is slashdot, so I'll probably be modded to minus infinity in about 4 seconds, but even if linux is good/great, it certainly couldn't be described as "successful".

source

For some reason those stats break out macintel as a separate section (bizarre), so by your own stats, OS X is at

  3.23% + 3.38% = 6.61%

which is considerably up from the previous positions. The stats you link to at hitslink also show 5.07 share for Safari for the same period, which contradicts your reading :

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

if you look at trends for browsers or OS you'll see that OS X has been steadily gaining ground, and is in fact very close to Vista at this point in time.

The w3Schools stats track close to those you will find elsewhere:

Operating System Market Share By Net Applications {October 20, 2007]

Today, more people are using OSX than Vista, and at Vista's current growth rates, this may inevitably remain a fact

I found that a little dubious, so I looked ip some figures. The first thing I came across was this:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

Just incase you don't want to click on the link, they have vista at 7.3 percent and Macs at 6.5. If you go to the precious month, Vista had 6.2, Macs had 6.3, so Vista would seem to be growing faster than Mac OS, largely, it appears, at the expense of XP. Really though, this is inevitable, since virtually every new PC sold comes with Vista. Still, judging from the trends, you ought to stop making that claim. It's already debatable, and it's only going to get more wrong as time goes by.

Today, more people are using OSX than Vista, and at Vista's current growth rates, this may inevitably remain a fact

I found that a little dubious, so I looked ip some figures. The first thing I came across was this:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

Just incase you don't want to click on the link, they have vista at 7.3 percent and Macs at 6.5. If you go to the precious month, Vista had 6.2, Macs had 6.3, so Vista would seem to be growing faster than Mac OS, largely, it appears, at the expense of XP. Really though, this is inevitable, since virtually every new PC sold comes with Vista. Still, judging from the trends, you ought to stop making that claim. It's already debatable, and it's only going to get more wrong as time goes by.

These particular "market share" stats in the article are based on web usage, not paid-for OS installations.
Specifically, the status come from here:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5

These particular "market share" stats in the article are based on web usage, not paid-for OS installations.
Specifically, the status come from here:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5

While I really want to be 100% behind what you are saying, it appears that the statistics are not from their access logs (I couldn't find any mention of that in the article - which does warrent a 'fuck softpedia').

The statistics appear to be from here: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

which they say gathers data from 40,000 urls. I would prefer to be wrong on this - so feel free to set me straight.

They don't say what those urls are - and they use their own judgement as to the breakdown - so statistically and scientifically, it might as well be coming from Softpedia.

Yet more evidence demonstrating that Market Share stats are complete bollox - as everyone who knows that Linux has 60% market share will tell you.

I'm not sure I would trust a survey that has an obscure scripting language clocking in at 0.13% in the September 2007 results.

"We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers. The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls and growing."

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

The release (and hype) of Ubuntu 7.04 in combination with the release (and bad publicity) of windows vista.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpcustom=Linux

Notice how the graph follows these events quite nicely.

I can agree that these numbers are far from perfect, but my point is, you're not likely to find more accurate numbers. If your evidence is from the logs of a specific website, I don't see how that proves anything. Possibly if that website was Google.com, but otherwise you'd need a large number of websites with varying content to get better statistics than these guys have.

The article's data is from Net Applications, which measures actual OS usage based on website visitors. They are not counting purchases, OEM installs, etc. They are counting the client info sent by the browsers.

Your criticism is irrelevant. Market share is not counted by money.

As I commented on http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=794

---
Gates explained it in 1998

I voted for "To try to grow IE 7's marketshare by adding software pirates to the count"; to partially quote what Bill Gates said in 1998:

"we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect"

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html

The 'addiction' can only happen if IE7 gets a vast-majority market share like IE6 had.

Now look at http://members.shaw.ca/Limulus/files/w3sbw2-0706.png

The numbers from w3schools.com aren't necessarily indicative of the overall web, but I've found the trends they show are.

Compared to the IE5 -> IE6 transition which was rapid and fairly X shaped on the graph, the IE6 -> IE7 tansition has stalled, with IE7 having plateaued at a level *less* than IE6.

This is very bad for Microsoft, as it represents a prolonged vulnerable state. Since IE6 and 7 are different enough that they need to be treated separately by developers, the difference in market share between IE7 and Firefox is small enough that website developers must take the latter into account too and thus support it (even if you take the Net Applications numbers http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6 to be fully accurate, and I don't, you'll note that the ratio of FF:IE7:IE6 is about 2:5:6. If it was all IE6, that would be 2:11) And if Firefox is supported, there will be less sites that are IE-specific, meaning less 'addiction' to IE.
---

I probably wouldn't trust those stats, they're taken from a developers' site so you're going to get much higher usage of alternate operating systems. Here's another one that's probably just as accurate: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2 and i think i saw another one around that pretty much was the same as this one.

The dismal failure of Vista hasn't pushed people to try Linux. It's only kept them on XP. Why would people switch to an entirely new platform when what they have works perfectly well?

I guess that depends on whose numbers you look at. At MacNN it says that Apple had 5.6% of shipments for Q2 2007. Then at this site it shows Mac had 3.33% of the market share. So who knows the real numbers. I would bet it is between 3% - 5%.

Not to downplay the threat, but is a new version of Windows out?

Yes, thankfully. It's been out for 8 months, it has twice the market share of Linux and OS X combined, and it's much more secure than the one it's replacing.

BTW, I think it's funny that you'd give so much weight to companies that you've referred to in the past as "snake oil vendors".

Given the fact that the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this or not. People will infect a mainframe if the given the chance and someone can be bothered to write the malware for it. Hmmm. BonzyBuddy for OS/390 must be quite an experience. I wonder if it runs on InfoMan...

Not to downplay the threat, but is a new version of Windows out?

Yes, thankfully. It's been out for 8 months, it has twice the market share of Linux and OS X combined, and it's much more secure than the one it's replacing.

BTW, I think it's funny that you'd give so much weight to companies that you've referred to in the past as "snake oil vendors".

Given the fact that the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this or not. People will infect a mainframe if the given the chance and someone can be bothered to write the malware for it. Hmmm. BonzyBuddy for OS/390 must be quite an experience. I wonder if it runs on InfoMan...

A new OS or fork that fails to gain more than 4% of the user base in 9 months

Actually, it's 5.4% in 7 months - http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=102

could only be considered a success in Redmond

Alternatively, it could only be considered a failure here.

so what do I know?

Well, you can always make stuff up. Oh wait...

Of course it does. And of course vista a failure.
In eight months it's only managed to fill up nearly twice the market share of ppc/intel macs combined, and upwards of 6x the share Linux has in the past 13 years, mostly at the expense of XP. source that isn't my blog

Yep. It's funny how something that would be a triumphant victory for anyone else is classified as a resounding failure for Microsoft. Compare it to Linux, which is still behind Windows 98 in overall use. Must be fun to not be limited by reality...

Nice rant, but I think Microsoft is far from crashing and burning. Even if Vista becomes the new ME, they'll continue to own the lion's share of the marketplace. As bad as Vista may be, it already has a larger market share than Apple and Linux combined.

Microsoft can afford to play the "long game" and dump cash into Vista until it either owns the market place or they come up with something else (which still contains the DRM and other trusted computing "feature" Microsoft needs to survive). No, the group that will suffer the most will be the software developers. Even the larger game houses (like EA) can't afford to have their market split like this (part of the reason for more console and casual game titles).

The ultimate irony here - Distrowatch.com. It just kills me. I guess they must be fabricating the stats, just like Wikipedia and everyone else.

MICRO$HAFT WINDOZES R TEH DYIEING LOLZORZZ!!!!!eleventyone

Heh.

There is something of an arms race between website content providers and users. Providers want revenue via various ad mechanisms. Users don't want intrusive ads, and the knowledgeable ones install tech that blocks intrusive ads -- popup blockers, adblock, even noscript with flash blocking enabled. Content providers respond by developing new ways to be intrusive -- popups via flash, DHTML-based ads, and the like. Users develop new client-side tech to block known threats, and the cycle continues.

So this is just a new step in the arms race, where some content providers will try to block users with tech that blocks ads, or encourages ad blocking, instead of developing better ad tech.

Problem one for this approach: such tech gradually becomes more mainsteam. Popup blockers are the best example of ad blocking tech becoming mainstream. Popup blockers started as third-party software, but first FF and then IE included integrated popup blocking. The author's own website endorses popup blocking (I'm not going to provide a direct link 'cuz I don't want to provide pagecount to this jerk), which is pretty ironic, since popups are all about ads. Now, all of the biggest browsers including IE can block ads via extensions; the complaint here is that FF "endorsed" adblock, not that adblock is available. Content providers are welcome to block FF, but they have to realize that tech like adblock is going to become more popular as a direct result of the intrusiveness of ads.

Also, with FF estimated at 14% market share, blocking FF means blocking a whole lot of potential customers.

A more logical response to adblock is to make less-intrusive ads (i.e. text ads, simple image ads) that are harder to block, and/or less intrusive. There is a reason why popup blocking is standard in all major browsers, but adblock and similar tech is not -- popups are very intrusive, while regular ads are less so. If content providers want ad-related revenue, they have to provide ads that don't annoy their potential customers. This is why superbowl ads, and many TV ads, are funny and interesting instead of annoying.

On a personal note, I like to support websites, so I browse using FF but no longer use adblock as of about a year ago. That said, popups and flash exceed my tolerance threshold, so I use noscript with flash blocking enabled by default, and leave the popup blocker enabled.

- Morty

M$ is sure to make this one of those awefull non-standards like ACPI

Standard enough for Linux and BSD to implement and use? Where's your standard?

Want to bet their idea of a no charge "implementation" is a NDA protected SDK?

Want to bet ISO and JPEG (the group) would not even give it the once over if that was the case?

They will then force it [... Windoze... M$... doom... etc]

Right, just like they did with the bitmap and DIB format. Oh, but you're cynical. I forget.

If jpeg 2000 is not good enough, there's PNG.

So you simply don't understand what each format is intended for or what their issues and strengths are. It's just the usual "that incompatible thing over there is good enough even if it's not, as long as it's not M$" attitude.

JPEG2000 is patent-encumbered, unfortunately. JPEG obtained "assurances" that no one would nail them later, but if I have to choose between the JPEG and Microsoft to defend me against submarine patents, my money is on Microsoft. Alternatively, you can always imagine that the patent system has disappeared and hope for the best.

they would simply surrender their patents

You know, I'm sure they'll do that - as soon as everybody else does. Patents are an unfortunate mexican standoff, and you can hardly blame Microsoft for the state of things. Oh wait, you can. You also hilariously blame them for the dotcom bubble burst, so I guess anything is possible.

they don't like free formats

Are you still going on about that? God, even the article says it was a mistake, which was corrected.

Let's just hope this bad idea dies with Vista.

Ah, your cute journal entry. BTW, I'm still waiting to hear how it is possible for all those Vista licenses you claimed Microsoft was "stuffing the channel" with miraculously managed to get themselves connected to teh interwebs?

The page I found is:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

which just clumps OS X at 3.5%. Which page are you talking about?

w3's values are not indicative. From their website:

> our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over five years,

From W3Schools' log files? It would appear that only a small percentage of Safari users visit W3School's website. Which seems logical.

Here's some more reliable numbers, widely reported in the tech media the last few months:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 0

From their site:

> The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls and growing

vs, ummmm let's see (counts with fingers) .... ONE for W3Schools.

This shows Safari holding at 4.49%, which is in line with the Mac platform's market share of about 3.5%. Linux market share, btw, is 0.7%. Which is entirely understandable. (Their share at W3Schools is rather high. Apparently a lot of Linux users are busy learning HTML.)

As you noted Safari does run on Windows. And you're right, Windows DOES suck!

If they make the port reliant on the TPM/DRM support present from 2.6.14 kernels onwards - not bloody likely. In fact it is likely to be possible to lock it down considerably better than Windows where this is not native to the OS prior to Vista.

I would speculate that the reason for Apple not doing any such port is completely different. There was a recent slashdot article about Vista/Apple/etc market share based on browser stats:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/ 23/1840206. This article has very clear stats which show that one of the primary targets of MacOS on Intel has been the desktop Unixes:http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx ?qprid=5. There is a direct correlation between the decrease of "Other" and increase of "MacOS Intel" in the graphs. I have also observed a fairly large set of converstions amidst friends and collegues in support of this trend.

If Apple ports iTunes to linux it will eliminate at least one of the market drives for these new MacOSX conversions. It is not mad to do so, so I would not expect any iTunes ports anytime soon.

I seem to recall something about one of the world's largest PC vendors starting to ship systems with Linux pre-installed. Does that sound like "a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop"?

They don't have three years left

No, of course not. Linux is where it's at, right? Except that even Windows 98 has more market share. With a combined market share of 93% for all "M$" operating systems, I can see how they're going to disappear in three years. Oh, wait. You said that in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Oh yeah, 2008 is the year of Linux in the desktop according to you. No, really. Too bad the desktop doesn't really work. Anyone who uses Linux knows this (and many other things), but it's just too inconvenient to mention them. Instead it's so much more productive to troll Slashdot with hilarious FUD and spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.

I've always been curious twitter, do you really believe this stuff you write? Seriously? Are you just delusional or does someone pay you to preach the same tired mantra year after year?

"it doesn't have as much market on the desktop, but it's still the second"

Well, technically it is 4th, but with a bullet, with only 78.42% less marketshare than the #1 OS.

Windows XP 81.94%
Windows Vista 4.52%
Windows 2000 4.00%
Mac OS 3.52%

"What would make far more sense would be to compare Vista + XP vs OSX. That would give a far better MS vs OSX comparison."

OK, according to the cited stats, that would be:
Vista + XP = 91%
OSX = 6%

I don't think that helps MS-haters' cause much.
(Nor does the fact that Linux's share remains microscopic.)

"What would make far more sense would be to compare Vista + XP vs OSX. That would give a far better MS vs OSX comparison."

OK, according to the cited stats, that would be:
Vista + XP = 91%
OSX = 6%

I don't think that helps MS-haters' cause much.
(Nor does the fact that Linux's share remains microscopic.)

"Seriously, ALMOST beating OS X's 6% market share when you are a predatory monopolist who has been cramming Vista down vendor's throats for six+ months now isn't something to be proud of."

If nearly beating Apple's market share after just six months is nothing to be proud of, what does that say for Linux? According to the same set of stats, both OSX and Vista have nearly an order of magnitude higher share than does Linux, despite Linux being free as in beer and getting 10 straight years of unqualified praise by both the tech and mainstream press, and despite having 500,000* programmers working on it for free.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

*500,000 = "one million eyes" / 2.