Slashdot Mirror
Debunking Linux-Windows Market Share Myths
bc90021 writes "Nicholas Petreley has a great article over at LinuxWorld explaining why it seems that Windows has such a high market share when 40% of developers are focusing on Linux. From the summary: "There are dozens of reasons why people have underestimated how quickly Linux has been grabbing Windows' market share. Windows starts out with a false boost and maintains its illusory market share even as it gets replaced by Linux. In 2004, don't be surprised when Linux overtakes Windows to become the main focus for developers.""
90% of the end users wonder "what is Linux ?". To them - Windows is the computer.
But that doesn't count, since many browsers are configured to lie about what they are to work around stupid JavaScript/Website constraints.
95.7% of statistics are meaningless.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
How is that an effective way to check? As a network admin I have 12 Linux servers and a Windows machine as my workstation. Guess which one racks up all the web stats on Google.
Keep in mind most Linux machines are servers and most people don't browse the internet with their servers.
Zeitgeist, we can assume, overwhelmingly refelects desktops, not servers. The article's author doesn't make to too clear, but it sounds like he's (mostly) talking about servers.
I'm also, I have to say, doubtful that any browser-sniffing gives an accurate picture of what people out there are using, because so many people set Opera et al (on any OS) to report itself as IE for Windows. Personally I think that's a terrible idea -- if I find a site that refuses to work with my preferred setup (Mozilla on OS X) I figure, well, what the hell, I didn't really need to look at that site anyway -- but an awful lot of people do it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Apple has a quarterly SALES pentration/market share of 3% to 4% but has an installed base somewhere around 11%.
Of course we all know what "Mac People" like to point out about the RISC processor being 40% faster than an x86 and in most cases 75-90% than a Celeron. Who knows about the Centrino. (What a poor name to choose - "trino" anything sounds miniscule)
It's the same way in the Linux community. Most versions of Linux run faster than Windows on the same hardware. (true in some cases on Mac hardware than OS X/OS 9 as well) There is a significantly higher number of 'nix users than M$ would like us to believe. I don't know the member numbers at Sourceforge & Slashdot. Not all are 'nix users but it is significantly high. That alone is large enough base. M$ wants everyone to belive that only mainstream/mass advertising companies (like themselves) have market share. They like to take advantage of the public psyche.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
So the margin of error is at least in the 5-10% area? That sounds quite large, for a survey that purports to take in a wide range of developers. Methinks the author is taking an overly optimistic view of the subject matter - but that's not really surprising...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I have to take this article with a pinch of salt - I know it's hardly empirical evidence, but almost every developer I know is not installing Linux over Windows, rather they're dual-booting their systems to run both Linux and Windows. Maybe this will change in the long run, but I doubt the swing will have been made by 2004.
I'd love to believe what he says, but it doesn't quite ring true from my own personal experience.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
Developing in a windows environment, even with something like cygwin or Visual Studio.NET just plain sucks compared to actually being in linux.
How is this? Sorry but having coded for many years using Borland's tools in Windows I found it very very difficult to adapt to Linux development: no context-sensitive help, no organized documentation (yes, lots of documentation, but no "central" organized index which means a research job for a fucking function declaration), no intellisense, no autocompletion, and having to resort to home-brewed makefiles is just a pain in the ass.
Could you please explain which tools are you using for development, so I can use them too and make my life easier? :-)
I can imagine a future when although a vast majority of people are using Linux, Windows still shows up in the "statistics" as the most popular OS, just because it is shipped by default with most PCs. As long as the Microsoft spin doctors could keep the myth going, manufacturers would still ship PCs with Windows pre-installed by default, thus reinforcing the "statistics". In effect, Microsoft could still claim the "Microsoft tax" even if nobody was using their product.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Rolling out 1,000 desktops requires virtually no developer input. Rolling out a unified health and social care workflow system (which is what I'm working on now) takes a lot of developer man hours - but when it's finished it will sit on one (Linux) server (and be accessed by hundreds of desktops, most of which will almost certainly run Windows).
This does not matter
We are not playing a numbers game. We don't need to take over the world. The fact that most users still prefer to use something else on their desktops doesn't make Linux a bad operating system, or a failure, or anything like that. Linux is very successful in a lot of niches. If it ultimately becomes more widely used than Windows, well, that will be interesting; but it won't make Linux any better (or Windows any worse).
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
"40 percent of developers"? How should I understand this figure? Do you count as one each person who just happens to develop ANYTHING, even some obscure freeware of no importance? "40 percent of developers" sounds like a shampoo commercial to me ("your hair will be 50 percent more healthy").
The irony here is that Windows gets an unfair market-share boost because it is inferior to Linux and requires more installations to do the same work.
While I wholly agree with Nicholas on most of the article, this line doesn't seem to help the community. One of the stereotypes of linux users is that we think it is better than everything else in every application. This is simply not the case.
I recently helped my grandmother purchase a computer. Her budget was large enough to get an iMac, so I suggested it, and she purchased it. I made sure she got the extended warranty from Apple because it includes phone support. She would not dial the number no matter how much I suggested it.
She liked to get face to face help, and everyone she knows uses Windows. They couldn't help her with her Mac, even though it's the simplest thing to use. In this situation, I bought the iMac from her and replaced it with a Windows PC, and she is now satisfied.
Every system has its place, and ignoring this fact will reflect badly on the Linux community until we realize it.
In the long run, we're all dead.
Not how the linux developers don't support the cause:
1. They usually download it for free rather than buy a distro.
2. They wiped the hard drive free of windows, meaning they didn't buy from a white box Linux vendor.
With friends like this who needs enemies.
Any company which wants to stay in business knows that it's the Customers who drive the business. Why do you think Motorola is such a crappy company? It's run by engineers! All they do is create, create, create, but never bother to ask "does anyone want this crap?" I have Linux at home, but that doesn't mean I'm blind ... customers drive the market, not developers. Convence John Q. that Linux is superior, and then everyone will use it.
I was reading this article and thinking to myself two seperate thoughts: "Well, that's odd...", and "Uh huh... who cares?".
I work for a non-IT consulting company. Me and the team of ~20 developers here write software for engineers to use in petroleum engineering consulting. All of the software, 100% of it, it developed for Windows. I look around and see 0% Linux developers, and 100% Windows developers. But, alright, obviously my survey is baised. However, I only know one single developer here who has ever used Linux, or any operating system other than Windows. The two of us both have our shiny Powerbooks sitting next to our desktop computers while we work, for e-mail and web browsing and the occasional graphics work. I think the statistic that only 50% of developers use Windows is rather odd... since 95% of users are using Windows. Are there huge fields of programmers who develop cross-platform software and trust that it will work in Windows without testing it? Or develop server-side software only, which never sees a user?
Secondly, who cares. I look at a project like Mozilla, and I can see that a lot of the developers are on non-Windows OSes. But I think the majority of even Mozilla users are Windows users. I advocate Mozilla to my friends and family, installing it on computers and replacing IE/OutlookE, and everyone is happy. They're using Mozilla and Windows, and I think this is highly common. FTL even replaced the 'INTERNET' icon on his grandmother's computer with Mozilla, and I believe the only comment she ever had was about the cute dragon. Developers may be using non-MS platforms, but they're still developing for users who are in Windows. Right? Or is half the world using Linux on their desktop, and I'm in some la-la land?
A large number of users buy a computer with windows xp installed. I've been looking recently and can't find a cheaper "mainstream" retailer that sells linux boxes cheaper than windows. In fact I just bought a laptop. Dell had the cheapest one that I liked, and it came with xp. Finding anything comparable with just linux on it I found I would be paying out the ass to get linux over windows.
Sometimes windows is cheaper, and definitely easier to find on new computers...plain and simple
Well, he may have written what you would call "another gnome sucks" article, but for a lot of people that article made a lot of sense. He actually penned the feelings a lot of users have about Gnome. Please, this is not a flame war about Gnome/KDE, but about how Linux spreads and how difficult it is to get exact figure on how many people actually use Linux. And here I agree with him. The nature of Linux makes it hard to count. The nature og how MS spreads also makes it hard to get a realistic count.
I would say it was a good article with a lot fo valid points. MS is loosing market and fast too.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!