Slashdot Mirror
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).""
are they happy ?
Of course Microsoft is (currently) winning the battle for dollars. You *have* to buy Microsoft products. You don't have to buy Linux.
A more interesting look would be to see how much money Microsoft is *losing* per year, because companies are replacing Windows with Linux.
It's the very same thing as moby said recently, he questioned why the worth of music is measured by the amount of sales. I agree with him that the music that really matters and defines our culture is not the charts.
Same for the operating system, what is it worth for humanity and our social system? How much of our resources we would have needed to spent (to microsoft) if it wouldn't be there? What money would the companies miss that use linux?
And note again becase it's free does not mean it costs anybody a job or is evil. After all not a single job should be just a occupational therapy.
(thats where the anti GPL comments fail, or where the adversaries miss the global sight. A job should be good for something, if we can save the work then better leave it, and leave us all more freetime, spent the time on the beach, etc.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
It doesn't make any sense to compare the "revenues" of a priced product and a free product.
What next? A startling revelation that people all over America are paying for HBO and Cinemax, but many are getting local networks like NBC, ABC and Fox for FREE?
All your favorite sites in one place!
Its not that Linux is free. Its more that the Microsoft flogging model of required and forced upgrades fails miserably in Linux. 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.
[political rant mode on]
"While experts still can assemble the required Linux components for free and create the same package that companies sell, customers will be leery of using that sort of customized software, Gillen said. "
I like how people feel no shame in telling what customers WILL do.
Reports like this are very usefull as an indication of what the news organization that reports them's position is. This tells me that news.com is a BigSoftware mouthpiece.
[/political rant mode on]
I can see thousand of posts claiming that Linux can be downloaded for free and hence sales figures doesn't matter.
But Linux was always available for free & all Linux users know that. This is not something which users found in 2001.
But, say 20% of the Linux users pay, then by co-relation, more often than not the number of users are also down. If Linux server sales were up, definitely you would have seen a revenue increase
Dan Kuznetsky, a Linux zealot, who is the VP of IDC software division, overcalculated Linux server unit figures for 2000 (at 27%) & his 2001 Linux figures came significantly low and having to eat humble pie since his Linux growth prediction didn't come true
The good news is that sales are up, especially for "client" computers.
The real danger to Microsoft isn't Linux's ability to generate profits, the real danger is Linux's ability to commoditize software. Eventually Microsoft's customers are going to learn that they can get more for less.
If Linux sales accounted for less than 1% of all OS sales, why is Netcraft reporting that over 50% of all webservers are running Apache on Linux?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Please take something into account. If this OS generates little to no revenue, how are the people professionally involved with this OS supposed to eat, pay bills, and the like?
It's easy to sit there and say "Well, duh, there's no Revenue.. it's a Free OS."
What's harder is to say how , if it's not gaining revenue, you pay the people who work on it professionally.
Because like it or not, it needs to make SOME money for it to survive.
Somewhere.
"The Linux operating system market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total operating system revenue each year"
"On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year)."
You're kidding!
You mean that Linux, which is free, generates less revenue than a commercial OS, which costs money? Wow, how long did these guys spend figuring this one out?
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
How would you measure the importance of Linux on the desktop and get some kind of indication about progress?
. ht ml
m l?legacy=c net
Definitely not easy to get at the truth. There is the difficulty of getting accurate figures for new installs, and of finding out who has in fact upgraded an old licence. On top of this there is a lot of marketing FUD aimed at boosting the share of your favourite OS. Even the sales figures don't tell the whole story as competition from lower priced alternatives may hold back price increases out of all proportion to the revenue collected by Linuxes.
I collected a few articles which talk about it:
First off on the server side with IDC reported by Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,50311,00
"According to market research firm International Data Corp., Linux will account for 32 percent of server installations this year, up from 27 percent in 2001. Windows will jump from 41 percent in 2001 to 47 percent in 2002. Unix, on the other hand, is expected to drop from 14 percent of new installations in 2001 to 10 percent in 2002"
For the desktop you can look at statistics gathered from unique hits on popular web sites, although stats can lie
http://lowendmac.com/musings/01/1219.html
News.com has had other IDC stories recently
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-243527.ht
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-938700.html gives some different figures
"Breaking into the desktop market will be tough. Although Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft isn't dominant in servers, it has 94 percent of the market for operating systems that run on "clients" such as desktop and laptop computers. Linux claims only 3.8 percent of that market, said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky. "
And from the BSD corner "BSD Desktop Share Triples That of Linux"
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/16382.html
There may be more money in Air than you think. Also, look at sales of Scuba gear. I imagine there was also sales to fire departments and ambulance units. It may well be that "sales of breathable air" were over $1 million, though I have no idea of knowing.
This doesn't include the other aspects of the air industry such as bicycle pumps and other assorted compressors. There seems to be a fair amount of industry dedicated to building products around using "breathable air" and packaging it so that it is more convenient or so it can be used where air is traditionally not available. Also, there are billions of dollars spent each year to detect air quality and see if it is "breathable," as well as filters to make air cleaner.
Now, it may seem like I am grasping at straws. However, I think the example of air provides a rather interesting case of market economics. I see many similarities between the markets built around air and Linux. You don't make the money on linux, just like you don't make money on air. You make money cleaning it up, packaging it, but most of all, using it. How many buinesses would survive without using air? None. Hopefully, we can make the value proposition such that the same will be said of Linux.
MS is indeed afraid of Linux. You see, with other competitors they can just squeeze their profits dry and kill them off. With Linux it's not so easy, because money and profit doesn't matter here. That is one less lethal weapon that they've got. In fact it's probably one of the major reasons Netscape crashed.
So go ahead MS, keep trying. Linux ain't dying buddy.
eTrade SUCKS
So, Linux companies have to rely on a different source of income, like for example, service and consultancy. That's hardly news.
The figures can also be interpreted this way: Since Linux is usually installed once (or multiple times, let's say, one CD purchase) and then updated regularly (patched, whatever), there is no need to buy a new version. You can't upgrade MS systems (I am talking about major version updates, as in Win98->XP, not Service Packs, which sometimes are more of an annoyance pack then anything else, but that's a different story...) incrementally for free. An update from, say 98 to XP is in comparison counted as sales.
With Linux there is often no reason to update the whole distro, just update the kernel, binutils, modutils and whatever you fancy. All this stuff would rightfully never be counted as sales since (I guess) few people would buy the CDs to merely get a new kernel. It's small enough to download even with a 56K modem in a reasonable amount of time.
So yes, that was yet another useless article which showed exactly nothing. It's like saying Pete Sampras scored no points in the NBA last season. This is also true, but proves nothing. He didn't even try, or maybe he did but realized that he wouldn't be able to pay his bills playing basketball. That's why he is still playing tennis for a living.
I feel so sig.