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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).""
I believe sales are down as people have learned that Linux can be downloaded...for free!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
The whole point of free (as in beer) software is that you don't *need* money to get it... I'd much rather see numbers pointing to actual in-use comparisons than money comparisons.
It amazes me that so many media people still don't get that you can't measure Linux's success in dollars and cents!
...analysts have been studying revenue generated by sales of air. Apparently total US sales of breathable air is close to zero. On the other hand annual revenue for Coca Cola is around $20bn. Clearly the importance of air has been overrated in recent years. In fact sales execs at Coca Cola have already been in discussion with publishers of biology textbooks in an attempt to replace unimportant chapters on respiration with new chapters on the metabolisation of Coca Cola products.
-- SIGFPE
I've seen reports similar to this apples-and-oranges comparison (revenue from free software vs. proprietary) for the last couple of years, but the last figures I've been able to find that actually mean something (market share, or how many computers out there are actually running this or that OS) are for the year 2000.
That year, M$ server OSes had a 41% market share, with around 30% for Linux. It's interesting that no one has ever released the figures for 2001. Apparently IDC knows what those figures are, but won't say.
WHY DON'T ANY OF THESE SURVEY COMPANIES WANT TO TALK ABOUT MARKET SHARE??? Is it because M$ is going down the toilet and they're afraid it will start an investor panic if the word gets out? Is M$ PAYING them not to release the information? Is it just that nobody cares and no one wants to know?
I'm an inquiring mind, and I want to know....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Anyone that successfully installs Linux and uses it for a short while will
A. Not need to upgrade in a long time.
B. Realize how to upgrade for free.
This is true for the server market, where the OS is still relatively detached from what's running on top of it, and there's a lot of incentive not to change that much.
In the desktop market, both of your premises are off base:
a) people want new stuff: Microsoft sold tens of millions of copies of XP within a short time of releasing it. People regularly buy new cellphones for size, color, or something else they could probably get along without.
b) at this stage upgrading is not easy at all. I upgrade KDE fairly regularly, and even though I use binary packages built specifically for my Mandrake distro (the supposedly user-friendly one), I still have to slog through the dependency swamp every time I install it. And God forbid you should try to build source....Even installing a new version of OpenOffice involves dealing
Recall also that the three or so years that a decent number of people have been making a go at Linux-as-a-business is a very short time. Much of what will happen has yet to happen. So the "analysis" by IDC is basically speculation on what a very short history means for a long future.