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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.""
You may recall that lately he wrote yet-another-gnome-sucks editorial (completely disregarding the notion of "user preference," which generally disregards technical aspects of a situation in the first place).
I hope he's right about this, but I look at it with cautios optimism. One can never really know for sure whether what you are getting is a factual account ot the way things are, or the way he thinks they oughtta be.
90% of the end users wonder "what is Linux ?". To them - Windows is the computer.
But I prefer to use the Google Zeitgeist, and it still says that only 1% of the people accessing Google are using Linux.
Trying to be totally unbiased here, but all these stats are making me confused about the "truth".
Dave
the key word is "developers". I'm a win2k/Mandrake dual boot guy. You know when I reboot? When I have to CODE something. Developing in a windows environment, even with something like cygwin or Visual Studio.NET just plain sucks compared to actually being in linux. Linux is a developers OS and a server OS. It is still not a desktop OS. It could be made to be, but it just isn't happening anytime soon. Look at MS desktop market share, the only one chewing on that is Mac.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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
Its articles like these that just annoy me. Numbers get played with to come out the way they want it to, so they can stand on their pedestal and ramble off things that in the end most people will ignore. Of those who don't ignore it, most will not believe a word of it and hold it up as an example that the linux community is out for world-domination or something silly like that (not that everyone in the linux community isn't out for that...), and a few people will actually believe the words, hold them as true and walk around spouting off these numbers until someone slams it in their face.
I'm all for linux in the enterprise and (for me) the home use, but I don't think the way to get linux into those places in the mainstream is to go around saying "Windows is better than Linux" and then stopping. The only way I see linux making strides further into to the server market is to just show people how it compares to other platforms on levels of cost, performance, and maintenance. It won't happen overnight, and it won't happen just because someone spouts off numbers that don't really mean anything - it will take time. But with the people doing the development on linux and linux apps, it will happen.
Just my $0.02....
--Joe
Actually, I don't know anyone of my friends besides me who uses Linux at home. No one.
I used to work in the telcom-business at a company with 120 employed (50 developers: C++/Unix/SUN), where four(!) used Linux at home. The reason for the others to have windows? Games - games - games- games - games...
Id Software and a few others have tried, but... And, Microsoft is working very hard to redirect any proto-Linux-users to MS; and when it comes to games, they still have a magnificent lead thanks to their DirectX efforts. That lead may even be reinforced by the XBox.
If 40% of developers are developing for Linux, where are the commercial apps? The big ones seem to be a handful. Freshmeat is great but doesn't represent the huge crashing wave of developer support. We all have our short list of apps we wish were ported.
I have a very hard time with this article - (1) no methodology is given, so the results are as suspect as Microsoft funded surveys; and (2) if 40% of all developers of all sizes are focusing on Windows, wouldn't driver support be 1000% better?
Nick appears to be dressing up wishes in the emporer's clothing of misleading "facts". Again. Anyone else remember his weekly diatribes of the vast superiority and impending market conversion to OS/2 in Infoworld?
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...
Proxies. Again, more linux users could be behind a proxy (a few hundred linux users at my univ go through a single proxy) than windows users
Third, some factors similar to those described in the article could be at work (linux more efficient ==> less linux servers for same job). Maybe linux users are more efficient googlers? I think this is unlikely, but still a possibiility.
Fourth, it doesn't agree with my webserver stats (i.e, counting the hits I get from google searches). Of course, my data set is quite small, but it can not cause a threefold difference (I get 3% linux, 5-6% Mac). Maybe its because the content I have is biased towards linux users, but on the whole it makes me think that some combination of the factors above may be at work in decreasing the perceived share of linux.
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
Ok, is Google popular enough?
Zeitgeist.
For why this number may not be accurate, see above; boils down to 1) are you counting installations, including servers, or desktops in your evaluation? Servers naturally don't access google, but depending on the app that you're developing, a server install of Linux may or may not matter to you. 2) People forge their UA to defeat sniffers; I think less folks do that than you would think, but I think Linux users are more likely to than others.
btw, the stats show that 1% of browsers accessing Google were using Linux; 4% were using some version of a Mac; 4% were "other"--meaning what, I dunno. Are there that many Be/Amiga users out there?
--
$tar -xvf
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.
So 40 % of developers "focus" on Linux. Even if we accept that statistic at face value (which is itself ironic in an article which seems to be at least partly about dubious statistics), it doesn't mean what I think the author intends it to mean.
There are a disproportionate number of developers who work on Sun boxes relative to the number of Sun boxes in the whole computing market, for instance. That just means Sun machines are being used in situations where there is more custom development work going on, and in situations where companies need and can afford to pay for more people to maintain code. The proportion of Sun developers doesn't speak at all to the broader market share of Sun machines vis a vis Windows machines.
I always get a laugh when I see an article about the misuse and misinterpration of statistics, which trots out its own to-be-misused-and-interpreted statistics. What's that old saw about lies and damn lies ?
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?
k-12 I used Macs in school, and I still use a XP box at home. The computers you use in school seem to have little affect as to what you use outside of school. Otherwise I would suspect that Mac would have a much larger market share.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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