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Linux Sales Down, But...
An anonymous reader writes " News.com has a story about combined Linux revenues reaching $80 million for 2001. "The Linux operating system market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total operating system revenue each year, or roughly two days' worth of Microsoft's operating system revenue," [IDC Analyst] Gillen said. "On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year).""
'On the second day of January, Microsoft had sucked more money out of their customers than the Linux community will for the entire year'.
Is an alternate way of looking at it. Which the customers appreciate.
Seriously tho, RedHat and company knows that they will never ever make anywhere close to what Microsoft has made selling software. But the idea is to make computing cheaper and freer, not to suck customers dry and invent new exciting buisness 'methods'.
As many have already pointed out, this is a useless piece of information. I work for a company that can only afford to do what it is doing because GNU/Linux exists. How does the revenue of my company get counted in this "revenue" figure? How many other companies are able to do more for less because they are starting to use GNU/Linux and Free/OpenBSD and Apache and on and on?
The revenue of companies that manufacture goods, while not insignificant, is less important than the network effects on the economy of infrastructure products like operating systems. These "second order" effects are often much greater than the first order revenue. Especially when we are talking about productivity tools (as opposed to pure consumer products like toothbrushes and deodorant).