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Debunking Linux-Windows Market Share Myths

Posted by Hemos on from the trying-to-make-sense-of-the-numbers dept.

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.""

10 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares about developers ? by thinktank2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    90% of the end users wonder "what is Linux ?". To them - Windows is the computer.

    1. Re:Who cares about developers ? by Deth_Master · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But if most developers are writing for linux, then more software will start appearing for linux. Companies hiring these linux developers will have software written for linux, and the end user will have to use it.

      It's kinda like using microsoft's tactics against them, the end users won't have another choice.

      I doubt that companies will want to develop a product for each OS, it's too costly. So, they'll pick a platform and stick with it. If most of the developers that apply for the job are specialized in linux, the company may decide that it's a good way to go, since lots of people are writing for it.

      on a more humorous note: My girlfriend cares about at least one developer...

      --
      find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown :us
    2. Re:Who cares about developers ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      But if most developers are writing for linux, then more software will start appearing for linux. Companies hiring these linux developers will have software written for linux, and the end user will have to use it.
      The problem is, by numbers, most software written is either for small commercial installations, or is written by developers for developers for fun. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of software is only used by 1% of users. Even if 80% of software written was for Linux, it doesn't mean squat, because almost all users just want IE, Word, MSN Messenger, and a few games, and nothing whatsoever beyond that.
    3. Re:Who cares about developers ? by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Fallacy.

      A linux user using 'doze for the first time experiences exactly the same thing, if anything even worse, if you compare the amount of cruft and general weirdness of linux vs 'doze.

      True, learning a new system is a big barrier, but I don't think there is anything intrinsically harder about learning linux.

      Its like saying "DVD players arn't for the masses" just because the controls are different from a VCR. If its useful enough, then people will just learn to use it.

  2. Re:Say what you want... by dkf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'!"
  3. Re:Say what you want... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Pinch of NaCl by IceFreak2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
  5. Re:keyword by Gheesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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? :-)

  6. nobody hit on this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Ignorance Maybe by iamweezman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    the user will still pay out the ass to get windows over linux

    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