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The article's headline is no surprise. But also note that the data quoted by the article shows that Linux's share of the market increased from 0.44% in July 2006 to 0.71% in June 2007. Go Linux!

The article's headline is no surprise. But also note that the data quoted by the article shows that Linux's share of the market increased from 0.44% in July 2006 to 0.71% in June 2007. Go Linux!

The article's headline is no surprise. But also note that the data quoted by the article shows that Linux's share of the market increased from 0.44% in July 2006 to 0.71% in June 2007. Go Linux!

Over the past several years in IT I have personally seen many new adoptions of linux and mac, and the "phasing out" of windows servers and workstations, in business and in home use, I believe my experiences to be a decent industry cross-section, enough to gauge the overall direction of the market.

If you want statistics that are on par with the article, take a look at these:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+ubunt u
From this graph you can easily see that Ubuntu will pass Windows in Google searches by 2008.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+mac
And in this graph Mac OS X has already passed Windows!

Now this is just skewed data on par with the Vista vs Mac OS statistics in the article. If you were to compare Red Hat to Vista, for instance, queries involving Red Hat show an obvious decline, while there was a sharp spike in Vista queries the day of it's release. Not news either. And thats the point.

Here are some "unbiased" statistics. Note that the w3schools site says the stats are unreliable, much like the ones mentioned in this article.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=96
http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/100047 6

I have observed in my personal experience that non-Windows OSes are very slowly gaining ground, and Vista seems to be encouraging that trend, at least for now.

And I was under the impression it was at 7%. See? I can make up statistics too.

I apologize for not giving references. Since we're talking desktops, and since most desktops are used for browsing (among other things), here are a couple sources that will help give some ballpark estimations of Linux penetration on the desktop.

W3 schools, a developer site shows 3.4% of their traffic comes from Linux machines. Since this is a site aimed at developers, this is probably higher than the actual desktop percentage. See http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp if you're interested.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 5 doesn't have a column for Linux, but the "other os" column shows 3.54%. It aggregates stats from thousands of websites, so is probably more representative of the typical desktop than W3 schools and can probably be safely used as an upper limit.

I'd love to see stats from other sources if anyone cares to post links to them.

Your link's stats indicate that Latvia makes up 4% of web usage, which is BS.
See http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2 for more accurate stats.

Ya rly.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 5&qpcustom=Windows+Vista

In under a year, Vista has managed to build up more than 6x the market share Linux has in the past 13 years. Over the last year, Windows XP has lost less marketshare than Vista has gained.

You're right. Obviously, this situation benefits Linux greatly.

Vista is clearly a failure.
XP is obviously fading quickly into oblivion.
And it's all because of Linux.

Also worth noting, according to the numbers on that site:

- Linux holds only a marginally higher share than NT or ME.
- Windows 98 holds a higher share than Linux does.
- Linux is just about half way between Nintendo Wii's share and Windows 98's ahare.
- Mac OS PPC holds over 5x the share Linux does. and is XP's third closest competitor, behind Vista and Windows 2000, respectively.

Well, that might be enough if the sample were representative, but based on the site, I doubt it is. According to Net Applications, Vista's market share is a bit higher (second after XP, having just pushed Windows 2000 into third place), but the reality is that there hasn't been a major PC buying cycle since Vista was released. The first will come when PCs are bought for students in the autumn, and the second will be the Christmas buying cycle.

The student and Christmas buying cycles will probably give Vista a big push in market share, since most new PCs are sold with Vista rather than XP, but even if Vista's market share growth continues at the modest pace seen since it was launched to consumers in January, it's only a matter of time before it overtakes XP to become the leading PC OS.

The people comparing it to Windows ME really haven't got a clue. Windows ME was mostly a cosmetic update to Windows 98, and the last of the Windows 9x line. It was obsolete before it was released, with Windows 2000 having been released shortly before it. If anything, the Vista release looks more like the Windows 2000 release: it includes a lot of technical improvements, which increase the hardware requirements, and mean that drivers in some cases will be in relatively short supply at first.

Thankfully, with Vista as another 'Windows 2000', Microsoft didn't do another 'Windows ME' by releasing a 'final version' of XP or something like that (to placate firms that don't want to develop new drivers for their old hardware). Instead, they're letting the 'ME' customers (i.e. the ones buying cheap/old hardware) continue to buy XP itself, so they should know they're buying an old version of the OS. This contrasts with the unfortunate people who bought Windows ME, mistakenly thinking it was a technologically up-to-date version of Windows. Owing to Microsoft's confusing naming conventions, some of them actually thought Windows ME (v4.9) was an upgrade from Windows 2000 (v5.0), rather than a minor update to Windows 98 (v4.1).

I don't quite see how such a situation benefits Linux.

The 8% I made up for my example was generous. It's most likely smaller than that.

If you want an idea of what percentage of machines on the net that are Macs, web stats are a very good indicator....

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

Others have seen a similar trend...

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

1. Vista isn't exactly in widespread use. The sort of people who poke holes in Windows and use it for spam bots etc will concentrate on XP for now as it is much easier. The anti-piracy and activation make pirating Vista a little harder, again this means the low life will not use it for a while.

I hate to break it to you, but Vista's userbase size has already passed Linux's, and it's not even close:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

You are asking us to believe that Linux market share in January was 0.35%, and then more than doubled three months later to 0.80% in April? Sorry, but those figures are absurd and unbelievable. I'd call them "crude estimates" at best because the website which produces them admits "We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers." They are using the user-agent string to determine OS type of the browser. In other words, the figures are based on a flawed methodology because the user-agent string is not reliable data, even more so for estimating Linux usage because many Linux users change it for use with web ad cutters, etc. Also, the figures do not include the large number of Linux servers, although the website misleadingly calls the figures "Linux market share", instead of "Linux desktop market share". I think those figures are no more accurate than ones from the other sources quoted.

If one were to believe all these anecdotes on /., one would be under the misapprehension that Linux is actually popular, but all the hard data show just the opposite: it's an insignificant niche platform on the desktop, with a tiny number of users even compared to the Mac. Maybe it will start to catch on some day, but right now it's completely irrelevant.

Right, that's why Vista already has a larger installed base than Mac OS on Intel.

Right. In my post and the one I was responding to, "they" refers to Mozilla. Mozilla has a 15 to 25% share depending on which web stats you believe. In comparison, the share of OSX users is only about 4 to 5% of desktop computers. Safari will have to become very popular on Windows before it's even the #2 browser. If they come out with such a superior browser that so many users want to switch, that can only be a good thing, as John Lilly has said.

This study shows there are already 5 times as many Vista workstations in use versus Linux workstations. Assuming Microsoft has sold ~20M copies through May, that means there are far fewer than 20M linux workstations in active use. Unless you assume that more than 4/5 Vista installs is pirated.

Note my original statement should have been qualified to compare Vista with Linux workstations, and not all "Linux machines". Comparing the population of a workstation OS to a server install base doesn't make much sense.

I don't know how reliable the source (Net Applications) is, but the market share growth for Vista looks decent. The figures only go back to October of 2004, and it's still very early on, but XP's market share looks to have peaked in December 2006. Some XP users have obviously moved to Mac OS X on Intel (MacIntel), but Vista had already surpassed MacIntel by April, and is on course to surpass Windows 2000, currently the OS with the second-largest share, by the end of the month.

You've done a nice job of trying to rationalize fanboyism. The truth is, fanboyism of any product, whether it be Opera or Firefox, is harmful to the product. Firefox, being the second most used browser with usage rising all the time, doesn't seem to be hurt by the fanboyism. Opera, being the fifth most used browser and usage below 1% according to NetApplications, can't afford to be hurt by fanboyism.

Your point about Firefox being covered on Slashdot more than other browsers is misguided. Firefox is covered more often because it's used so much more than other browsers, with the sole exception of Internet Explorer. It seems like your main annoyance with Firefox is just that it's more popular. There's really no reason to be envious of the success of others.

Lastly, just because Firefox has fanboys doesn't mean Opera has the right to have fanboys. You admit yourself that it's annoying. Why annoy others with fanboyism when you admit yourself that your sick of fanboyism?

No links forthcoming to back up the claim that "Linux isn't taking more ground"?

Frankly the statistics vary greatly. IDC said in 2004 that Linux market share exceeded that of OS/X. Other research focusses on hit counts to their sites and generate statistics as vaired as the content and readership demographic. We can conclude that Linux seems very popular amongst web developers. Independent statisticians place Linux and OS/X at about the same on the desktop while IDC's own competitor says Linux sales are at less than 1% of other operating systems.

Given 'market share' is often mistaken for actual install base (very few home users pay for Linux) a more reliable means of counting is perhaps provided by reading package repository server logs. ">Here's one case of that in action regarding a distribution very popular amongst this so called 'average user'.

It's tricky without the benefit of more probabistically centric records like those of Google's Zeitgeist anymore.

Your argument is starting to fall apart here... ;) I'd guess that a better guesstimate of the total number of Windows market share (in terms of numbers of home users) would be more like 75% than 90%

Bollocks.

I have never, ever, seen any seriously researched set of figures giving windows (in it's various flavours) anything less than 90 percent of the desktop market. If you or anyone else would care to link to any research that backs up your 75 per cent claims, I'd love to see it. The top hit in google for "operating system market share" gave me this. They give windows around 94 percent.

I don't use any Windows machines at home - and none of my family/friends do either.

Well, since we're talking anecdotes now, I do not know a single person who does not have at least one windows machine. I know one other person besides myself who runs Linux at home. I don't personally know any Mac users, but my wife has a friend at work who uses a Mac. Oh, and before you tell me my friends are luddites, I had lunch with a bunch of them saturday, and the group included two games developers and three IT support people. All of them use windows exclusively.

massive communities of people running VERY OLD hardware out there and would never dream of switching (C64, Amiga etc etc etc)

You and I clearly have very different definitions of the word massive. I would be amazed if you could find a reputable set of statistics giving those platforms a combined online marketshare of above 0.5 per cent.

The maths is of the situation is really fairly simple:

a = cost of changing website to be standards comliant.

b = cost of business lost from other browser users boycotting your site.

If a > b, then changing the site is stupid. If b > a, not changing it is stupid.

I'm not pretending that every site can just happily ignore the standards, support IE only, and never worry for a second about lost business. But equally, some sites probably only lose a vanishingly small number of customers by not supporting standards. For sites with a tech/geek audience, it's a priority. For sites with older/less tech savvy audiences, it's really not.

"Since you can assume that everyone has IE (at least everyone who uses Windows), but the amount of people who'd have Firefox is way smaller, IE is usually the browser of choice."

Psst, 67% of slashdot users are FF. And here IE only shows 78% with a consistent downward trend. 22% is very significant user base in my book and if the trend continues it will be larger next year. When its 55% IE, 45% other I sure you will still say, "see, everyone is using IE", no doubt.

"MSIE still occupies 85% of the market."

Last years numbers. Obviously, stats vary. But Here it shows IE under 80% with a downward trend.

IE usage share is currently less than 80% (at least according to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 3).

At what point to web designers decide that they need to cater to the remaining 20%?

Even if we do assume that their figures are incredibly accurate, this is how it shakes out:

Windows: +0.20
Linux: +0.15
Mac: -0.30

Not a huge deal, although I think the Linux uptick is a bit of an unreported story here. Also, what's with the share of Windows NT growing from 0.71% to 0.80% (the only other MicroSoft OS showing growth)? That's like a 12.7% increase for an ancient OS! So, yeah, given that anomaly, I'm somewhat disinclined to give their figures that much weight.

This chart on browser trend is interesting too. IE's market share is slipping like the Big-3 autos. Slow and steady.

I can't wait until IE dips under 50%. That should drive off the last of the 'IE only' websites, which seem to be decreasing in number (of course, I support one at work, though for a limited corporate audience- gack! I am lobbying heavily with the vendor to support Firefox!!).

But I hope Firefox doesn't get too dominant (fortunately, it won't). Competition and the adherence to open standards (at least for more mature technologies) are good things.

The criticism about sales vs. avg. machine lifetime is valid.

In the auto industry we look at UIOs- "units in operation" - that is available via state vehicle registration records. On the whole, the data is pretty good.

Of course, we don't need to register our computers (yet), so we don't have that option.

Assuming the data isn't crap, I noticed that Apple has been gaining market share at an average of 0.34% a month since last September, until the 0.3% dip this past month. They went from 4.3% to 6.4% pretty quick, and it's notable b/c that's switching vendors (unlike Vista, which is mostly same vendor, different product). What will be interesting is the next couple of months- was this just a blip? What happens when Leopard comes out?

I'd put my money on 'blip'. I hereby forecast continued growth for Apple, though maybe averaging 0.1-0.2% per month unless they come out with some kickass hardware soon.

And no, I'm not a fanboy.

There is nothing to install. You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on.

Here is the operating system market share for February, 2007:

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

So what do you think those other 42 vulnerabilities do? Make your Mac smell like sunshine?

Windows has 93.05%* market share. Mac has 6.38%* market share. That means there are almost 15 times the amount people possibly trying to break Windows security yet it has less vulnerabilities and took less time to release patches.

In fact Mac users were left vulnerable on average over 2 months longer than Windows users. This is not a small margin and this is definitely not what Apple's commercials are selling people.

*OS Marketshare

why would I lie about it?

Because you lie about everything else? I mean, the question isn't "Why would a Windows user say 80%", it's "Is it worthwhile even considering you to be a reliable source", to which the answer is: No.

Apart from name-dropping, your data point is about as useful as the paper it's printed on. In the meantime, reports such as this one are far more useful, as they actually have data to back up their claims.

Only time will tell if Apple is just as bad as MS. While they are gaining market share, at what point do the vulnerabilities turn into money? 8%? 15%? 39%? (I'm going off of these figures)

With help from third parties (AV software (no, I'm not talking Norton...), firewalls, etc.) I think Windows is a LOT more secure than it used to be. I personally wouldn't trust MS by itself. But it all goes back to market share. No system is invincible, so why not go after the biggest and milk it for all it's worth?

For a snapshot of the web population at large, check this site:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

Their stats are updated regularly, they've got a reasonable level of detail, and lots of pretty graphs.

However, as others have pointed out, you need to be worrying about your particular audience more than anything else. A site like the one I've just given isn't all that useful unless you've got a really huge web site. So here's a three step plan for YOUR web site:

1) At first, design it to work smoothly with as many browsers as you possibly can.

2) Build up a profile on the types of users who visit your site. There are lots of programs that can help you do this. Google Analytics does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint, which some people swear by (it costs $30 USD). There are lots of others out there, of varying quality and abilities. Take your pick.

3) Once you've got a profile built up, tune your web site to suit the abilities of the browsers that most of YOUR particular users favor. You might discover that only 0.002% of your visitors are using Safari, meaning perfect compatibility with Safari is not a major concern for you. Or you might discover that the Opera users of the world swarm your web site like ants swarm spilled sugar, in which case Opera becomes a priority for you.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

They are certainly not perfect, but it should give you some idea.

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

I'm pretty sure OS X adoption is increasing over the long run. Sure every day brings a reason why it will be OS X 97.86% and Windows .05% (iLife 07, Microsoft is doomed!!!!!) but Apple is making progress. 14BC-2005,2006?
The app for Macs isn't univerrsal yet (photoshop)

You're exaggerating to say that 35 percent of the market uses something other than IE. As a Safari user, I'd certainly like more people to use anything other than IE, simply because it forces sites to pay attention to cross-platform compatibility. But IE still controls something like 80 percent of the market.

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

Hi, Twitter! Good to see you. Farming with this account again, after you managed to get eight Troll mods in a row with your main one, eh? I was very impressed at that, good going! Anyway, to business, we can't sit around here, chatting about 'old times', eh?

These stats seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.

Unfortunately for you though, according to these figures, even Mac usage is increasing more than Linux usage is, which I find to be a great pity, as I'd much rather people were using Linux. Oh well, eh? And this is from one website - others suggest Windows XP has an 85% market share, or even in some cases as much as 90%! Obviously 'not good enough', so I'm wondering how Linux's 3% marketshare ranks on that incredible scale of yours?

MS credibility? Better than ever! Sorry to break it to you.

Finally, Vista doesn't suck. I should know - I'm using it. Have you? Don't answer that, it's one of those rhetorical questions you've heard so much about.

Now lets put that in perspective.
From http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=95/
For December 2006
OS Market Share(Percent) Botnet(Percent)
Windows 93.87 23.47
Mac 5.67 1.42
Linux 0.37 0.09
Other 0.09 0.02

Now there wouldn't be that many in those last 3 sets of figures for various reasons and to be honest I do not trust the original data.

You're quite correct that Firefox has security holes aplenty. Seems like the fix more and more holes each month. But IE is the main target for malware.

Microsoft should take the easy way out and just drop IE and bundle Firefox. Overnight, Firefox would become the prime target. Then it will be put to the test as to just how secure it is. If it is security as its advocates claim, then it's good for everyone, including Microsoft (since they no longer have to worry about browser security, and this scenario would actually eliminate one of the reasons people would have to move to a different OS). But if Firefox isn't all it's cracked up to be (and I don't assume that Firefox devs are any smarter than anyone else, and we *know* that the browser has security problems through empirical evidence of the frequent security patches), then it's still good for Microsoft, as they still don't have to worry about it as it wouldn't be their problem. They would just continue on their merry way while the press bashes Firefox instead of Microsoft.

Microsoft could instead drop IE for Opera; same thing. Except there's every possibility that Opera has more holes than IE and FF put together. Opera's user share is so tiny (Opera's share is ~0.9%) that it hasn't been put to the test at all by the bad guys. There's no way to tell how secure it is or not; it's simply not used enough (and Opera's fixing security flaws in secret doesn't help their credibility regarding their "perfect" security record).

Seeing how MacOS and MacIntel were split up, the numbers probably came from Net Applications.

Search results and index size are not applicable when talking about search advertising. Those numbers are completely irrelevant as Google, MSN, and Yahoo are not required by law to provide any level of quality in their search results. They can show whatever they want organically.

The argument is that since Google has close to 73% world market share in search traffic, that they also have that same 73% in search advertising. If you leverage that by showing your listings first in the adverts, you are unfairly manipulating a monopoly.

That's only for Google.com, not their other offerings such as google.jp and such. World share is about 73%.

Having failed in proving that Google is a monopoly, the basis for the rest of the article is vacuous.

That's just Google.com, not all of the other sites they own. Google has more like 73% world share.

1) Cost to the average user. When you decide you want to or need to use Microsoft software, it'll cost you. Non-OEM copies of Windows are quite expensive (~$300?). When you decide to use Google to look for a website, it's free, other than having a few ads on the right side of the screen. I've never sent Google a dime, even though I've used many of their services (search, maps, etc.) for years.

As I, and other posters, have been pointing out. You are not the consumer, nor the customer. You are the product. The advertisers are the customer. They are most definitely charged by Google for their services. Google also has close to 73% world market share for search. That directly translates into 73% world market share in search advertising, which is the monopoly.

Google has almost 73% world market share in search. That gives you 73% world market share in search advertising.

That's the monopoly. Not search itself.

Sorry. Wrong.

Google has almost 73% world market share in search. That gives you 73% world market share in search advertising. That is a monopoly. No one is arguing that there isn't competition for online advertising companies, there are. Google's content advertising has many competitors - as do their free email services, map tools, ect.

Back to the 73% search advertising market share. If you have that much of the market captured, AND you leverage it to get placement for your OTHER services - you are manipulating a monopoly unfairly. Everyone complained when MS did it with IE and Office, now people are defending it it because Google did it.