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Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh
prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is optimistic about desktop Linux's future, telling a story of Capital Cardiology Associates, whose 160 employees migrated to Linux desktops. Furthermore, Business Week expects IDC to announce desktop Linux installations to reach 3.2%, for the first time overtaking Macintosh market share. By 2007, IDC forecasts, Linux will be installed on 6% of the desktops. It's also worth mentioning that desktop Linux market share for 2002 was 2.8% and that year it was behind Apple's operating system."
Google Zeitgeist still says Linux is 1% and Mac 3%
no, it doesn't. It qualifies it as OS X, based on Darwin. Freebsd is indepedent of linux, and freebsd, netbsd, openbsd, and darwin(which borrows much from freebsd) are in no way a 'linux distro'.
To be a linux distro, the OS has to actually USE linux. *bsd and darwin don't use linux, they use their own open(and similar to eachother, in some parts) kernel.
Interesting follow-up to that:
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Win32 is getting a pretty nice grip on this market. Almost all of the MCAD (mechanical CAD) companies offer win32 versions of their software.
Smaller, niche CAD players, do offer both Linux and Mac versions. PTC, one of the bigger players (for a while longer at least) does Linux today, with Mac coming.
The problem is the number of users running strong win32 based programs. (AutoCAD, Solid Edge, Solid Works) While none of these packages offer the level of capability the bigger packages do, their numbers are creating a significant network effect. Very few mechanical engineering departments, found in small to mid-sized enterprises, run anything other than win32 systems. The big players still make good use of UNIX, with Linux being rare at this point and OS X being more rare or non-existant at best.
These systems are increasingly being tied to back-end PDM (product data management systems) that aim to drive the product knowledge throughout the company. The reasons for doing this are sound, but the platform in the lead right now is win32. Given the strong intergration between win32 and office, additional intergration involving engineering and CRM software, Microsoft is getting hold of manufacturing and product design companies in a big way.
Both Linux and OS X are going to have an increasingly hard time cracking this nut. All of the MCAD sales people use win32 running laptops. Older UNIX products are being ported and adapted to run win32.
Many folks in this market do not even have Linux on their radar yet.
Given this is my area of expertise, it is a depressing story really. Linux and OSS in general are a great story that almost never gets told in this space.
Microsoft has been growing at the expense of commercial UNIX vendors, in this space for the last 8 years or so, almost unchecked. This is an area that Linux is ready for in many ways, due to its technical nature. The ECAD people along with the movie studios demonstrate this clearly.
I'm afraid, without ports to Linux from the big players, the mechanical engineering and product design markets are going to be win32 for a long time to come yet. Even with the ports, the mid-range packages (having the majority of users) are win32 only at this point, because they leverage Microsoft tools at almost every level of the software.
I fear the home software will come first. Maybe I am wrong, I hope I am.
Blogging because I can...
From the article, "Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s... Macintosh... software."
My company, SurveyComplete, programs online surveys for market research companies. That's all that we do, and we're damn good at it. In fact, I'd say that we're the best in the world at what we do at this point in time and I'm proud of my work. Last year we completed nearly fifty research studies, covering over 800,000 interviews.
This story really ticks me off because we performed an Awareness and Usage study across Internet Users (just two weeks ago) on the topic of Operating Systems and found that Linux is absolutely not overtaking Macintosh.
While 26% of the 1,100 respondents we interviewed were aware of Linux or one of its many distributions, only 1% use it on a daily or weekly basis. Macintosh comes in at a healthy 6%.
One of the most interesting findings in the study came from when we examined techies against the rest of the population and found that "Respondents who are male, aged 35 or more, use broadband, and are college educated (some college or more) are far more likely to be aware of Linux than the rest of the population" to the tune of 43% awareness of Linux in techies versus 15% in the rest of the population. That's a huge gap, a gargantuan gap. When we examined the operating systems respondents currently use, 3% of techies are using Linux versus less than 1% of the general population.
When I read the results, it really shocked me. Why, this means that 2004 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop -- this goes against everything I've heard on slashdot! All those hours I've spent reading articles by people in the open-source scene talking about how this year, was going to be it. But this makes more sense: Nobody has really heard about Linux outside of nerds.
Which is probably why the results of our study never appeared on slashdot (even though they were submitted last week.)
It's really frustrating that this pro-linux propaganda gets through onto the front page while articles like ours which have results that make sense, get dropped.
You can read our study results and find out if BSD is truly dead, here:
2004 SurveyComplete Operating System Awareness and Usage Study
Yeah, but considering that Apple caused it's own demise by sticking to proprietary hardware
Demise?
Net sales increased $465 million or 8% during 2003 compared to 2002...Gross Margin of 1.7 billion...recent innovation....
Helluva death. One that a lot of companies would like to be enjoying.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I have a Master degree in computer science. I studied together with a 100 people at my faculty. I work as an IT consultant at a rather respectable company, yet I have never seen a Mac in my life (just in pictures). Suprised ? Well, I live in Poland (approx 40 million inhabitants).
Apple is pretty nonexistant in my country and probably in many others as well. The barrier in a country where the average salary is $500 and there is 20% unemployment is the price.
The IDC survey, as I understand it applies to users worldwide and new computers! Your survey measures existing usage, which is something much different
confuse market share for installed base. IDC (subsidiary of IDG) is one of the worst undercounters of Mac marketshare and installed base. A quick look at Google's Zeitgeist shows 3% Mac, 1% Linux. I know these number are not perfect as we all spoof browser IDs, but I think the the ratio of Mac to Linux boxes undercounted due to spoofing is also likely 3:1.
Apple has sold nearly 30 million Macs since 1984. The PowerPC shipped a decade ago in 1994. Any PowerPC will run OS 9, any G3 will run 10.2, and any factory USB machine will run 10.3 (officially, XPostFacto). That is something like 20 million machines still in use mostly as desktops.
I don't hate free software, and I think Mac OS X and Linux complement each other. I just hate these so-called analysts with their biased numbers. My wife used to work for an economics firm that did analysis for the telecom industry. I would liken what they did to selling cosmetics to ugly people to make them look better. They tailored their reports to put the companies that were paying for the reports in the best light no matter what the truth was. IDC is no different. If Apple gave them a crapload of money, they would say Apple's marketshare far outpaces Linux.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Yes, but there are two big factors that changed.
1) Open Office is good enough. Open Office used to kind of suck. A lot of bugs have been fixed in it, and you can sit down and actually do work in it. Office applications are the big barrier out there.
2) Big companies are backing Linux. IBM's been behind Linux for a while, and now Novell, HP to some extent, etc. The mainstream folks now are willing to go with Linux.
It will still take time. There is no magical 12 month window. However, Linux users are increasing. Not many folks move from Linux to Windows, and there's a steady flow of users to Linux.
Remember that about ten years ago, there were just a handful of Linux users looking out at the wide world and what might happen. I'd venture to guess that the number of Linux users has done better than double each year, and that's pretty respectable growth.
Remember when Linux wasn't a serious server OS? There were folks that said that it was a toy, and that you needed a real UNIX system if you wanted to do serious work. Well, damn, Linux seems to have tromped all over and overrun those "serious UNIX systems" on the server.
Has Linux become a major desktop player yet? No. Has it gotten more desktop users each year? Yes. Has it gained more corporate support each year? Yes. Is the software getting better faster than Windows? You bet.
And as for the link to Syllable...get real. All the complaints you listed, *especially* the ones about market share, apply tenfold to AtheOS. Hell, I'm a geek, and *I* didn't know that there was an AtheOS fork.
May we never see th