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The Problem With Estimating Linux Desktop Market Share
jammag writes "It's long been one of those exceptionally hard-to-quantify numbers: exactly what percentage of the desktop PC market is held by Linux? Doubters suggest it hovers around a negligible one percent, while partisans suggest it's in excess of 10 percent. Bruce Byfield explores the various sources of estimates, dismissers' and fan boys' alike, and guesstimates it might realistically be 5-6%. Still, he admits, 'the objectivity of numbers is often just a myth.'"
Estimates are already a form of guessing. The word 'guesstimate' make me want to puke blood.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
since most all Linux distros can be downloaded anonymously for free from many servers/mirrors around the world there is no way of knowing for sure...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Can't wait until Wolfram Alpha goes online. This question will finally be answered once and for all.
While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.
My work here is dung.
Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably. For some uses, this does not matter, while for others it matters a great deal. That and the fact that the article ends with a cop out, "We have no way of knowing which is closest to the truth" makes this pretty useless.
Most of these types of figures are always done with sales, and since Windows is the only pre-installed option on a new PC and counts as a Windows sale when you buy it (even though you were buying a PC, not Windows) it's always gonna skew the figures. Even when your PC leaves the store with XP on it, it's on the books as a Vista sale. The game is rigged. The fact that Linux is not available in many outlets as a purchase it will never gain any parity.
You could look at downloads, but not every download is installed, not every install stays that way. Some are installed on many PC's with the same CD. Each distro has their own counts and ways of counting / estimating. Personally I like the Fedora way of counting the number of unique IPs hitting their repos.
Even if there was an accurate way of estimating, it'd be bought by Microsoft to ensure it knew who to make the winner.
Go out on the street. Talk to about 1000 people. Ask them what operating system they have on their home computer.
My prediction on the results
Huh?: 45%
Windows: 25%
No Computer: 20%
Mac: 8%
Linux: 2%
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's just tipped above 1% for consumer systems that are used for internet usage. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16860
Munging together servers and clients is a pointless benchmark. Linux could have 30% of the server ecosystem, but that would make a 0.001% indent on client share.
Regardless, 1.02% is a far cry from 5 or 6 percent, never mind 10%. Who would even say that a Linux machine makes up 1 in 10 machines on the web, haven't they seen all the Windows machines, all the business machines, etc?
Seriously, how to you define desktop today? Linux holds a decent share of the POS/retail market. Are point of sale devices desktops? How about thin-clients? Some have a small Linux OS that RDP's to a Windows server. Is that a Linux or Windows desktop? I just finished a project where the thin clients were diskless and hosted totally on servers. Do I count the servers or the thin clients as desktops? At home I'm 80% Linux, 10% Mac and 10% Windows, but from the outside how am I counted.
Just as with any evaluation system it's not that different to assess Linux use as it is any other.
You can count the number of hits a series of websites get that come from a unique address over an extended period of time. The sampling of sites has to be pretty massive. You couldn't just use a few and the types of sites would have to vary significantly to get a good cross-section. That variations would also have to understand the Linux users will visit sites, at times, primarily targeted at Linux users.
I'm not one to go out and browse around the web. I get my news and follow links but rarely past the initial link. I will do Google searches but rather choose more than the first few off the first page to see if they match my needs. I visit specific sites such as Slashdot.org and a few others, but never really venture much farther even when I have a large history of bookmarks. There's just too much information out there with me having too many interests.
The failing of this type of system of measurement becomes noticeable when you consider that I may have downloaded 1 copy of Linux but I installed it on 12 machines internally. I also rarely visit the web on more than a couple of them. I use the OS as an OS not solely as a browser. Essentially 2-3 of the 12 would be counted when using web page hits as a measurement tool.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I tend to think of Mac's & *nix being around the same market share, perhaps around 7-8% but both growing by the month as Microsoft piss off more and more people. It will be a while before either get to a significant chunk of what Microsoft once had but took for granted, but slowly it's getting there.
3 laptops
1 tower
2 older towers to sell
winxp sp3, ubuntu 8.10, ubuntu 9.04
winxp sp3
ubuntu 7.10, ubuntu 8.04
so lets see, statistically
2/6 windows
4/6 ubuntu
but then again, i have been playing with linux since 1997 with debian and slackware on a pentium 133.
Forgot to add, that it's gonna vary from country to country too, just like Firefox numbers. Some countries have more resistance to Microsoft bullies than others.
I dual boot Ubuntu and Solaris on a sun sparc box. Which do I count as in terms of "desktop market share"?
The problem with being a Linux user is that you tend to find other people who use it and remember them more because it is unusual, then your own estimates of people who use Linux will run higher because you overvalue the data points you know about, and you lump all the other users out there into 1 data point, even if there are far more of them.
I can say that in my law school class of a little less than 200 people we are above the 1% mark... because there are 2 of us that use Linux as our regular OS. If anything the Mac userbase at school is probably quite a bit higher than it is in the general population, but there are still plenty of genero-crap Dells that I have to help revive from time to time.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I think a more important question is, how many people use Linux as their primary desktop? I know I have several Linux machines and only one Windows machine at this point, however, I tend to use the Windows machine much more frequently because it has far superior hardware. My Linux machines are more or less on-going projects typically.
If you took reports from major websites (Google, ESPN, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc), I think that would be the best metric for filling in any gaps.
That would give you a percentage of an OS actually used.
Oh, numbers are objective. But raw facts do not come with their own correct interpretation.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
say, for or against gun control
and both sides trot out numbers, facts, that support their assertions
when the truth of course is that various quantities out of context can be twisted or misunderstood as to meaning
simply put, when dealing in the hard sciences, numbers rule. but when you get into politics, religion, sociology: numbers mean shit
but try telling this to a committed partisan when you debate them on various issues. they take your avoidance of numbers and their dubious meaning as some sort of implicit admission of defeat
when in reality, the issues are one of logic, reason, and principles, not bullshit numbers and their essential uselessness in supporting what you think they support
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One of the primary problems of estimating the number of users who use Linux or the BSDs is that, if they use them there, they likely use Windows at work. So at work they tally in the Windows column, even though it is only because they have to.
I think in order to get a better picture, they need to estimate the number of Windows users who are using it at work and then cut them out. The comparison of what is left would give a better idea, I would think, about what people use when they have a choice in the matter.
It's the analysts who are (probably) underestimating Linux. You can be absolutely certain that both MSFT and AAPL are very aware of their competition. They'll both have labs full of Linux installs (plus OSX and Windows respectively) where they examine what new things are added, old things removed, what's fixed and what's left broken. These are companies with billion dollar budgets. Spending maybe a million (20 staff plus a big office) to research your competition is obvious.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Just to add a little more confusion:
The folks I know who use Windows at home, and there a lot of them, don't tend to use their computers very much. The folks who use Linux at home use their computers a lot.
One way to estimate the number of desktops is to use web statistics. Since each Linux desktop is probably used twice as much as each Windows desktop, the net based statistics probably over-state the number of Linux desktops.
On the other hand, a seldom used Windows box really isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, is it? Because of what they are used for and how long they are used, Linux boxes are probably much more important or consequential than Windows boxen.
Discuss.
One problem with estimating Linux desktop market share is there's no one definition of market share. Is that worldwide share, English-speaking world share or USA share? Is it a share of operating system licence revenues, support revenues, the cost of hardware on which Linux is installed or is revenue irrelevant? If it's usage-based, do you count physical machines or virtual machines? Does it matter how much a machine is used; if so, do powered-up unattended desktops count? Or is web usage the best metric? If so, should you include non-PC web usage: phones, games consoles and the like?
There's no one answer because there's no one question. So, as with many statistics, you need to choose a proxy measure with some care and pay more attention to trends than to absolute numbers. Like the original article, I incline to the view that Net Applications' data presents a measure (hits to websites that are usually commercial and US based) that provides an unusually low estimate of Linux usage. However, Net Applications has provided consistently measured data for some years, so its analysis is extremely valuable. And the trend is clear - Linux is consistently growing in popularity and, in percentage terms, it's growing dramatically quickly.
Seriously. As long as there are enough people writing good software, who cares?
Majority market share brings with it:
* Being a virus/malware/spyware target
* Dumbing everything down for the least common denominator
* Insecurity through monocultures
* A ton of crap loaded onto new machines
* Every app in the world putting its own icon on your taskbar
Seriously, folks... if it meets your needs, it doesn't *matter* what the next guy over is using. If Linux should ever achieve 90% market share, or even 50%, I'm off to greener pastures.
Don't make the mistake of thinking Linux is malware-proof. It's not. It's just not much of a target with a few percent market share.
Linux runs all the software to do the tasks I need to do, and then some. That's sufficient. I don't need to be personally validated by having the rest of the world run what I do. Anything that attracts the Public At Large is *always* going to be crap. Let's leave our little NON-crap corner of the world go by unnoticed, whatdya say?
If X is any good, the first rule of X is you don't talk about X...
"I don't have an operating system on my computer. I use the Internet."
You'd be amazed...
Not to jump off topic, but personally, I don't think market shares are as important as having the systems preloaded on off-the-shelf computers from places like BestBuy. While it may be gaining popularity among tech savvy fellows with an iPod, it's a simple matter of fact that most average folk are ~afraid~ to reload their OS. The "year of the Linux desktop" will never come until you can buy one off the shelf. Once it happens, ordinary people will ~finally~ be exposed. Also, the economy of Linux systems will become apparent when consumers have to pay -extra- to "upgrade" to Windows.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
I agree. I especially like it when some government agency or other switches without much ado, or comes out saying that they have it running the back end. Because one thing I do not see in the future is people converting from an established Linux solution back to Windows: the costs would appear to be astronomical.
Actually, on the Desktop side, Ballmer during a investor meeting said biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows. Linux and Apple are blips and while they continue to make headway, it's extremely slow and not that large of a threat.
What about people with more than one computer?
Do you want to know about only their "main" computer, or all of them?
If it's only their "main" computer, what about people who use two machines equally? One vote for one, no vote for the other? Half-votes?
If I can only vote once, how come, since I bought more than one computer?
If I get to vote more than once because I have more than one computer, how many votes do I get?
Do I get to vote for my old Sun3 that I haven't switched on in years?
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-daily-20080701-20090505 You can break it down by country or region
How do you count someone who used Linux, BSD, and Windows, either in a multi-boot system, or on separate computers? There is truly no way to get a hard number for ANY OS. There is no way at all. A downloaded ISO of Linux or BSD could have been burned to one disk, or many. or it might not have been used at all. How many are using pirated cracked copies of Windows?
Sure, you can count corporations that buy licenses for Windows, or that have switched to Linux etc... Same with government agencies, but even that will not necessarily be an accurate number for those cases.
Any kind of hard number of who is using what is just not possible. Anything but a hard, provable number is just a wild-assed guess.
Ah... Linux adopts the Ralph Kramden approach... bluster about some indeterminate point in the future when you're going to totally kick someone's ass.
"One of these days, Microsoft, TO THE MOON!"
While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.
Fair analogy, although, while we're doing animal analogies, I would look at MS or Apple as the "big dogs" and Linux as a shitload of bees holding the (important but not cruical) hive together. The difference being that even if a bee is lost, or even the hive itself, it's not over, whilst the dog is one.
I am the lawn!
I work at Apple. I don't know (or care) what Microsoft does, but we don't have labs of linux or windows computers. Obviously, we need windows for testing our windows software (Safari, iTunes, QT, Boot Camp etc) but the kind of research you're suggesting doesn't happen and would be a huge liability in a patent/copyright lawsuit.
Agreed. Even the words "market share" are almost meaningless for Linux. "Market share" is the share of the market...how exactly do you count sales for something that's given away for free?
If I buy a PC with an OEM Windows license, then download and install Linux on that box, what does that mean? I've given money to Microsoft in exchange for a product, and no money to any of its competitors. Obviously, a market share point in MS's favor.
The Net Applciations numbers track "usage share" (the percentage of people using Linux for day-to-day tasks) and is probably the most meaningful if you were, say, trying to figure out whether to port your desktop app or game to Linux. (This number is skewed slightly since a large percentage of web surfing is done from work PCs...if you're a game developer, you don't care about work PCs.)
TFA also suggests counting Firefox downloads. That's a seperate quantity, akin to counting the number of Ubunto ISOs downloaded. It gives you the number of people experimenting with Linux, not necessarily using it. Naturally this is higher than the Net Applications number...my two Linux VMs both count toward this number, even though I spend less than 5% of my time playing with them.
As for USA vs. Europe/Asia...well, it kind of depends on why you care. If you're just a armchair Linux advocate, then you'll get the warm fuzzies hearing about global Linux adoption. If you're a US software corporation, you probably don't give a rat's ass.
You know, 95% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I run a couple of sites that probably cover both extremes in terms of Linux desktop market share. The stats are as follows:
Site 1: A local community site based in the UK; so the profile here is 'UK home user' (I find similar figures for other UK home focused sites I manage).
Windows 92%
Mac 6%
Linux 1.5%
Site 2: A site for an open source business application; the profile is therefore 'global IT worker / developer'. The picture is very different.
Windows 60%
Mac 30%
Linux 9%
The actual figure is between 1.5% and 9% then, depending on the ratio between home/office workers. As I imagine there are more home desktops than work desktops, my leaning would be towards the lower end of the scale.
3% to 5% seems like a reasonable estimate.
Dan
(Stewie has shrunk himself and inserted himself into Peter's body to kill sperm. He doesn't want a little brother until he meets his match--his sperm brother who looks and acts like him.)
Stewie: You hate Lois? I hate Lois too! What, what else do you hate?
Sperm Bro: People who send pictures of their families as Christmas Cards!
Stewie: People who use the word "guesstimate."
Sperm Bro: Guys who wear sandals with socks!
Stewie & Sperm Bro in unison: JASON PATRICK! (flap hands effiminently, jump up and down and say "EWWWW!" together)."
Part of the problem is also establishing what counts? I personally have 4 "Desktops" around the house with a Unix-like OS. Do those all count toward the total? Or should they count for two since only two people use them?
And what about the boxes I have that I no longer use? Most of them are also non-Windows PCs.
I can see where 1% of users might be Linux, and a much higher number (though 10% seems darn high) of boxes are Linux.
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
The number is somewhere between 0 and 100%
This being the internet, I look forward to somebody disagreeing with me.
No, really. They know.
The sort of people "responding to his blog post" are more likely to be computer "enthusiasts" and more likely to have Linux.
A better question is "how many of these people use Linux EXCLUSIVELY".
This figure would indicate to a software company whether it is worthwhile supporting Linux in addition to Mac and Windows. If your users are already using non-Linux then you are not forcing them to install non-Linux to use your product, so there is no reason to ship a Linux version.
The answer to this question is probably: 0.0001% of people use Linux exclusively.
Look at all the people you know who use Solaris/*BSD/Linux systems of any distribution and almost no-one does not dual boot Mac or Windows for one reason or another, either at home or at work.
Get real.
First of all, there is clear notion that statistics can be "lying", or even better, people are drawing wrong conlutions from them. That's fine, because decrypting stats is daunting task and can require full-time team of specs to do that.
I personally don't care about TOTAL number, because it is not all about market share. As lot of people have already pointed out, most people DON'T care about what OS they use, they care about APPS. So question is more like - do Ubuntu has nice DVD player with Tango niceness and integration with rest of desktop? No? Vola! Afaik, Gstreamer guys works on one so it could be available commercially for OEMs and people who cares about legitimacy of DVD playback on computer. Do Linux has Visio replacement? Of course it doesn't. It is so hard to do? No! (let's be honest, it's not a web browser). So why then anyone ignores it?
Because everyone waits for some kind of grand sign to come out! :) Guess what - unless Linux Foundation don't create some kinda of OEM sales counter, Linux sales will and will stay a mystery.
Anyway, numbers does matter to check progress. But it is only one of things. We, Linux devs and active users, have still lot to do. But let's not forget that that's OS for us. We do this for us. And rest of bunch are just invited to join :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Does anyone know what happened with this? http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/04/deploying-kde-to-52-million-young.html 52 Million is a pretty huge number, and I wonder if people are counting it in their estimates? Should the recipients of an enforced rollout be counted?
My mother drives a Toyota, which is the most popular car in the world.
James Bond drives an Aston Martin DB9, which has less than 1% market share.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I did a quantifiable survey. On my desk, I have two machines running Linux, one machine running Vista and one running XP.
2/4 machines are running Linux.
Therefore, Linux adoption is 50%.
(The margin of error for this survey is +/- 50%)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
You can't count the number of downloads. That's pretty much worthless. I download firefox and keep up to date installers and I install it on absolutely every computer that comes into my shop for repairs. Then I discuss with my customers exactly why they should be using it instead of IE.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The real measure is how many people *exclusively* use a linux desktop. Not as a second machine, not as a supplement for a Mac or Windows machine/install. I'd love a good, universal linux just as much as the next guy, but I'd bet there are very, very few people who use a linux desktop exclusively. The niche of us slashdotters doesn't count :)
It's technology oriented, but not computer-oriented:
1.Windows 80.60%
2.Macintosh 13.83%
3.Linux 4.36%
4.(not set) 0.52%
5.iPhone 0.43%
From there, market share starts to get vanishingly small.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
The number is somewhere between 0 and 100%
Four out of every innumerate internet troll disagree.
Web stats don't work either:
- Many users use "User Agent Switcher" in order to visit sites that 'demand' Windows
- Public terminals (schools / libraries / cafes) inflate the numbers
- It's not uncommon to have to use Windows at work while using Linux at home
I somehow suspect these numbers (1% Linux market penetration, and such) are for systems that are shipped with the OS pre-installed by the manufacturer. That would seem about right to me. However, many systems cannot be ordered without MS Windows of some sort pre-installed, yet people remove that and install Linux, or dual-boot their systems with Linux. Even my grandson, who got a Windows system last year (my old Dell D600) switched from Windows to Linux after his Windows system disc blew up, and he is LOVING it! So, my best guestimate about actual market penetration of Linux is probably about 5-6%. It seems about right to me. Right now, I only have 2 programs that I must use which are Windows-only, so I mostly run Windows in a VM on a 64-bit Linux host. I have just installed Ubuntu on my laptop and will only run Windows in a VM there as well, as soon as I finish setting it up. Even my bluetooth wireless headset and Skype work fine on the Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04)!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
"It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example."
I wonder how many desktops I would count for?
- Approximately 12 installations since 1996, most recently Ubuntu 8.10
- Each one updated where appropriate until dropped
- NO current installations (removed 8.10 one week ago)
It's not that I don't try... I really do. I just always end up trying to fight my way through some ridiculous little problem. I live with it for a while, then I come to realize I've just stopped using it (I triple boot), so I reclaim the drive space. This time it was ten minute shutdowns.
Now that I've ceased getting updates, how long would I remain on the roster?
In another eight to ten months I'll probably have another linux desktop running briefly.
It's a hard picture to nail down.
Commonly linux users will have more than one machine (I have... 4 all within arms reach right now). So the market share for linux is probably way above what usage figures show. I also have an XP license stuck to the back of the machine I'm typing on and yet this machine has never booted Windows.
Registered market share for me would be 1 XP license when I'm actually running 4 linux 'desktops' (and quite a few VM images).
That's true, but unfortunately beside the point. Many product managers and the like have such confusion over the terms of the GPL that they believe any software they write to run on a GPL'd platform (like Linux) must also have a free license.
Or, at the very least, they believe that they'll be sued into releasing the source code.
It doesn't really matter that their perception is a fiction: unless people who already have these managers' attention can make a convincing case ("convincing" in the PHB sense, not the reasonable-person sense), the perception won't change. And there won't be as much commercial software for Linux.
This results in the wonderfully circuitous circumstance that consumers don't adopt Linux because the games/etc. they want aren't available for it; and those games don't get ported to Linux because there's no market share.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Please pass this message to the appropriate people at Apple:
Thank you for not killing the Mac mini, thank you for putting the nVidia 9400M in it, thank you for not only keeping FireWire but upgrading it to FW800 and finally a huge thank you for the dual display support.
And the following data:
http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
is very different (4x higher).
And I can argue both sides of these numbers: people learning web technologies may be more or less likely to be Linux users, statistically.
So right now, we're seeing data that is based on marketing: the web site with the best marketing department has the most widespread results (and who knows who pays their marketing budget, to be paranoid?).
Only Google and similar organizations know "for sure", and even then *they* don't due to embedded uses of Linux, POS systems, and the developing world where traffic statistics will be undercounted.
At best, you can use these data sources for *trends*, and not absolute numbers.
There's two data points the surveys are likely to miss, though one is VERY small and unlikely to skew the results.
I rolled my own desktop system by purchasing the various components (mobo/CPU/RAM/...) and assembling; said box has been through three versions of Linux and never seen an MS install disk. Is this somehow being tallied in? Doubt it.
The "scrub the pre-installed Windows and reload" scenario is probably more prevalent, but still unlikely to be in the counts. I'm looking at a netbook, and probably one with an internal HD vs. flash storage. Most of those come preloaded with XP. If I get one, the first action is plugging in an external optical drive and reloading with some netbook-friendly distro. Do they count the preloaded XP I was sold, or the Linux I'm actually running with?
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Ultimately it exists and is there for you to use, and does everything you need it to do. What other people choose to use is completely irrelevant.
Google Analytics shows that of the 20,000 or so visitors to my web site in the last month only .67% are identifiable as Linux. So 1% sounds about right...
What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.
Are you sure it's not already too late? Microsoft has been trying to kill Linux for years, and the damn thing won't die. And how can you kill a think like that? Yeah, you could drive Redhat and Canonical out of business, I suppose... and then anyone on earth would be free to pick up where those companies left off and keep developing.
It's a classic problem
How do you find the length of emperor's nose if you're not allowed to raise your eyes to look at his face?
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
There are many questions, and each have a different answer:
Hardware producing company - How many computuers have linux installed? (~3%)
Software producing company - How much time is spent using linux? (~1%.5)
Web site developers - Dont care about OS, just browsers hours ( id guess >50% firefox)
Average ubuntu user - Whats the biggest number people will belive for linux share? (~5%)
Enlightened Linux user - Who gives a shit, linux is my favorite os!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
n/t
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Reality distortion fields are very prevalent among believers. I use Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In the past I have used FreeBSD, OpenBSD (they're dead you know!), OS/2 and others. In my everyday life, working with co-workers, interacting with friends, paying attention to machines in use at the bookstore or coffee house, I've never seen a Linux machine in use outside of work or my home. I do have one co-worker that says Linux is his primary OS at home with a Windows machine only for gaming. One thing I have noticed is a surge in Mac usage. Last weekend I actually had a period of several hours where I only saw Macs in use on a street mall. At every coffee shop or sandwich shop you'd find at least one person with a laptop and I only saw Apples, I was actually incredibly surprised. I think the fact that more software houses are writing for the Mac shows where people are migrating too.
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Linux and Apple are blips and while they continue to make headway, it's extremely slow and not that large of a threat.
Assuming this is true (has Ballmer ever admitted he/MS feels "threatened" by anyone?!), even $10 million/year is only "a blip" in their $6.6 billion/year research budget
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
you'd think a bunch of programmers could see the error here...
Ask those 1000 persons "Do you own a computer? If you do, do you run linux?". We don't care about the granularity of what percentage windows or mac or solaris is... just which of the Yes I own a computer are *also* Yes I run linux.
My bet; about 10 percent of computer users run linux somewheres, sometimes. They may not know it though, especially if it's Ubuntu ;) as they're probably recipient of a linux-advocate. Now, *that's* guesswork :)
Follow the growth of consumer computers and follow it to current time. Do that minus the amount of OS X installs and minus the amount of Windows installs. Now you have Linux and everything else.
Look at that number and think... Now do that minus the amount of BSD retail CD's and multiply that by 0,95 for accuracy and you'll have an acurate number X.
Do f(x)=x(100/y) ,where y=amount of consumer pc's @ current date and you'll have the percentage of Linux desktops.
Here be signatures
I think the most important reasons for a lack of games is a purely business case reason predicated on market share.
It is not that the developers are walking away from 30-50 million Linux users, it is that they look at their limited development dollars and ask, 'It is more profitable to use our development talent to create games for those 30 to 50 million Linux users, or for 10 to 100x as many Windows users?'
This logic does not require any considerations of licenses and is at least partially divorced from cross-platform development issues.
Rather then capturing a share of the market, Linux makes the market go away. Windows and Apple can continue dominating their shrinking market while I download Ubuntu for free. I don't participate in the OS market place.
It makes a lot more sense to talk about Linux usage rates. Web site statistics can provide a rough estimate but what you are measuring is heavily skewed by how much time various users spend using the web. I suspect casual computer users are far less likely to be Linux users.
there has to be some significant penetration now if supermarkets are devoting shelf space on the magazine racks to Linux magazines...
competition for shelfspace in those racks is cutthroat... if they don't sell, then they get dropped for titles that do sell.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Wasn't it that meeting where Microsoft showed a presentation slide depicting Linux at 8%, with the Mac slightly behind?
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
we can be sure that Linux is the most used on servers (of all types, not just web servers) and in embedded devices. I have purchased at least 2 items (Sony ebook reader and dlink home san) that I had no idea were running Linux. I would venture to guess that many people are running Linux somewhere in their home without even knowing it.
Microsoft are guessing by how many Licences they sell. as linux is free there is no easy way to match it.
How many people buy windows PC and then wipe it and install linux (i have before)
people that build new computers and install linux. many will do that.
Microsoft know nothing i have 8 computers/servers and i am running 4 windows and 4 linux. i'm sure that microsoft know i have 4 licences but as they do not know of the other 4 they will clase me as having 100% windows.
Not a fair way to work it out
I downloaded 1 copy of PCLOS 2007 about two years ago. Since then, I have remastered it in to 5 custom distros for my office, including a coupld generic desktops, my own server edition, my own custom desktop, a rescue disk, and so on.
I have easily done over 100 installs, on at least 20 different machines in that time. I then when 2009 I did an update from 2007 from the repositories, tweeked the install, and remastered my own distros again.
How do you even start to account for that, especially when the concept of the monolithic distro is slowly disappearing in to child distros and custom remastered distros?
Living in Chile
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
No he doesn't. The only reason Microsoft is used at all in the places it's pirated the worse is because it's free or nearly so. That's the only way they'll get the lock in that'll get them any revenue in those places. If people there had to pay full price from the start Linux would be king.
Who is John Galt?
Partisans suggest 10%? WTF? That sounds like someone needs to get out of their parent's basement and start living in reality. Perhaps they know nine other people in the world, and so assume that 10% of everyone uses Linux. But it' simply not true. 10% of the people my company use Linux. But we're a Unix development shop! In my circle of friends, 2% use Linux, and we're all geeks and nerds.
You simply cannot extrapolate your narrow slice of the world onto the whole.
But on to the good news: It doesn't matter what the market share for Linux is. All that matters is that you choose to use it. I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD. It doesn't matter to me that fewer people use it than use Windows, or Mac, or Linux. It's my choice and that's all that matters. I don't have a need to use the same software everyone else is. I don't need to drive a car the same color as my neighbor. I am free to be an individual. So choose your own operating system, your own distro, your own pick of packages. Build it all from source if you want. Use something polished like Ubuntu, or hardcore like Slackware, bleeding edge like Arch. Or think outside the box ad try FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.
The key is to put yourself in charge, not the market share.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I'm sure he said that. I'm sure he thinks that. But nobody thought an iceberg was a threat to the Titanic, either.
Windows' biggest competition is NOT pirated Windows. It's OLD Windows. XP to be specific. It's good enough, and people don't want to pay to upgrade. Computers are reaching a point where they're all just about "good enough" for 90% of people. People just see little reason to upgrade any more. That is what is going to kill Microsoft. And the people who will spend money and tinker with machines are flocking to Linux in droves. It's a neat new toy that doesn't cost them anything now that Microsoft has locked out a lot of piracy. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot by trying to stop piracy of their system.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
yes: what year will be the year of the Linux Desktop?
and whenever you argue with someone who is against gun control, they are knee deep in facts and figures. they try to use facts all the time. as for "honestly" using facts, i don't know what honesty is supposed to mean in this context. people honestly fight for their convictions, if that's what you mean
furthermore, i don't know why you think the concept of an "emotional argument" has a negative connotation. the argument for gun control is emotional. the argument against gun control is emotional. there is no such thing as an argument over gun control that is not emotional. furthermore, emotions and passions are the foundation for any social policy in the world, for or against any issue you can dream of
show me someone who can make an emotionless argument, and i'll show you someone who doesn't care about the outcome, and therefore has no business in that argument. emotion is far more important than logic in reason in any policy dispute there is. the place of logic and reason is only to sway people's emotions and passions into alignment with yours
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What about millions of laptops sold with both Windows and Linux installed?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yes Balmer did in fact say that the biggest competition to Windows on the desktop was priated Windows. However, he did not say that Linux was a blip. He actually ranked Linux as the 2nd biggest competition while OSX was interestingly considered to be a very small threat to Windows. This prompted lively discussion here on Slashdot. He had this to say [sort of paraphrasing], "They have a great product and an unbeatable price." This explains a lot about why they feel Linux is the next biggest threat and also is telling about how arrogant they are over there at MS. The fact that an operating system is free (as in beer) is a huge selling point, especially in the developing world. MS feels that when you take away price, Windows will still triumph over Linux. Also, since OSX is not free and there is not a lot of pirating of it either (lots of technical hurdles involved), price is always a factor and OSX must stand on merit alone.
To clarify, this is what Balmer thinks, not me. I agree with some of his points, that free is hard to compete with, but he is definitely over estimating how many people are choosing Windows on the grounds of quality. Most people choose Windows becuase they "have to". They are stuck using an application that is only on Windows or maybe they dont' realize that there are other operating systems you can put on your computer (most don't know what an operating system is). He assumes that everyone using Windows has made a definitive choice to use it because they think its a great OS, but the reality is that many of those users are unhappy with their "choice" and would "switch if they could". Take away lock-in and ignorance and all of a sudden the OS market gets flipped on its head.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I'd just say you are a villainous turncoat.
Total cost of "20 staff plus a big office" plus all the hardware & software to support their research is going to run you far more than "maybe a million."
Rough numbers based on the numbers that HR shares with us at my company is that it'd be more like a 5-10 million dollar cost for that group of 20 people. Still perhaps a blip in MSFT's or AAPL's overall budget, but not an insignificant one when every group is being asked to justify its existence due to shrinking margins.
Therein lies the challenge! :)
It also wouldn't be so far fetched to assume that he was just trying instill some confidence amongst the investors. Internally there is benefit to recognizing Linux, but it may not be something he wants investors loosing sleep over.
Right. There are, presumably, a finite non-negative integer number of "computers" consisting of a microprocessor and a display, of which a subset have ran Linux and an open source desktop environment (or maybe the text mode virtual console should count too?) for more than 50% of their uptime (not counting BIOS boot time). Presumably, a subset of computers have also ran Windows for more than 50% of their uptime. Clearly, those subsets are not distinct because of virtual machines, so it is possible for the subset of computers that "run Linux" to overlap the subset that "run Windows", but that shouldn't hinder the ability of anyone to state the actual number of computers in those subsets.
Actually collecting the statistics may prove difficult, but that should be interpreted as "the objectivity of limited surveys is just a myth." Picking on numbers is just silly.
The market share is in it's own right is just a comparison number that can tell how the market develops. For the long term development of the Linux Desktop it probably cruisial WHO is running Linux. If school pupils, teachers, journalists, politicians and descisionmakers is running Linux then it is probably more important than having yet another dude install it on a left over computer to check out that it actually works.
No.
The main problem is that the PC took its recognizable - adult - form in 1980.
The IBM PC struck all the right notes.
The IBM keyboard. The 80 column display. The 16 bit CPU.
The IBM PC and PC clone would evolve into something easily adapted to any environment from shop room floor to the executive suite.
There were successful MS-DOS PCs on the market before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
The OEM system install - unpack the box and you are good to go - is a milestone. The default Microsoft install is a milestone.
The integration of hardware and software may never be as polished as OSX and the Mac. But it will work.
In 2009 that takes the fear of ordering the refurbished quad core 64 bit Vista PC with 8 GB RAM, wireless, Blu-Ray, HDMI, and NVIDIA gamer-graphics video from TigerDirect.
In the mid-nineties you have Win 3 and Win 95 - and Windows has built up an all-but-unstoppable momentum.
Linux as a client OS needed to hit the ground running no later than Win 3. It needed OEM support from Day 1.
That would seem about right to me. However, many systems cannot be ordered without MS Windows of some sort pre-installed, yet people remove that and install Linux, or dual-boot their systems with Linux.
How many?
In the Net Applications stats IE 7 and IE 8 have about 50% of the global desktop and Vista around 25%.
How many of these people do you suppose have ever heard of a "user agent" or would be willing to chance editing it if they did?
Open about:config in Firefox.
Intimidating, ain't it?
Who cares when it doesn't make a single dime for its providers?
i don't know about other laptops, but seeing the crippled thing that runs on my friend's eeepc would turn anyone off linux for good.
my friend is dumb/normal enough not to notice what os he's using. and linux missed a great chance to make him a user. he'll soon stop using the eeepc instead(try to sell it), thinking he bought something that sucks.
The Windows Bubble will burst like the housing bubble. Everyone assumed that their homes were worth a certain amount of money. They kept doing things, like cashing out equity, based on those numbers. Then one day, we find that the numbers were off by a large amount. Chaos ensued.
The same will happen when it is discovered that there is nowhere near the number of MSFT installs as was assumed. The chaos will be glorious.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
And that's probably right considering they have over a billion installs and are a convicted monopolist that got there by criminal practices of which they were found guilty.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
an emotional argument sets social policy way before one based on logic ever will. because emotion moves people to act. logic and reason meanwhile don't make people to do anything. the idea is to argue your emotional convictions with logic and reason: that beats other emotional arguments that are less logical and reasonable. but if all you have is logic and reason with you, and no emotion, you are utterly doomed to 100% failure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is by far the largest Cloud service in the world. From what I can see using their AWS control console probably 90% of the OS public images used are Linux based.
... or Windows Server 2003... I don't think so!!
So... given those Cloud servers implement everything from Web Sites, to Telephony servers, to VoD servers or Audio Podcast servers, etc etc.
How does anyone measure the number of internet users that are utilizing Linux and don't even know it???
All of the thousands of Apache web servers ???
So is someone going to count just the standalone desktop user running XP but who in today's world might be spending 80% of their time using Services and/or applications running on Linux
Which is a more real measure of "use".
AWS has near 1 Mil servers, Google the same? Does anyone think they are running Vista