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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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably.
I'd go farther. The term "market" is sufficiently ambiguous and using it invites all sorts of connotations that simply aren't applicable, or are relevant only in narrowly-defined circumstances. For the vast majority of downloads and installations, there is no money changing hands so there is no "market".
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!
No, really. They know.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.