Is Linux's "Overall Market Share" Statistic Meaningful?

ruphus13 writes "Linux recently achieved 1% market share of the overall operating system market. But, does that statistic really mean anything useful? This article makes the case that it doesn't. It states, 'Framed in the "overall market share" terminology, the information (or how it was gathered and calculated) isn't necessarily questionable, it's more that it's meaningless. It's nebulous, even when one looks at several months worth of data. [How] Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question — and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions — and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means. ... Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one. ... No one system can be everything to everyone, and no one system (however powerful, or stable) can do everything perfectly that just one person might require of it in the course of a day. While observing trends and measuring market share are important, the results (good or bad) shouldn't be any platform's measure of self-worth or validation. It's a data point to build on (we're weak in this area, strong in this area, our platform is being used a lot more this quarter, where did all of our users go?) in order to improve and stay relevant.'"

Comments

of course it means something numbnuts

[timmarhy]

it's 1% of how they were measuring it. what you really want to know is how meaningful are the metrics used to produce that 1%.

slashdot, missing the point as usual....

Re:of course it means something numbnuts

[Fred_A]

I claimed, and continue to, that linux can be a fine desktop for people who know how to set it up well enough. I personally don't want to invest the time to do that.

Most long time users don't want to fiddle with their machines any more. Been there done that... wrote X11 conf files and modelines, compiled kernels that would actually run their hardware (after getting the missing drivers), wrote window manager rc files... now most of the "old timers" I know just want their stuff to work. Hence the popularity of "ready to use" desktop distributions such as Mandrake, ?Ubuntu, SuSE or any of the less vocal ones. Even with experienced people (not to mention the newcomers of course).

It's really exceptional nowadays that you have to do anything more complicated than add a repository when you need some exotic software. I think I haven't even compiled anything in ages. It just works. And when it doesn't, it's a regular system that's (usually) easy to fix. So I can just do my stuff, process my images, talk to my servers, in a comfortable environment. Works for me at least. To each his own of course.

Re:of course it means something numbnuts

[Bert64]

As someone who's been using unix for years i can agree with that... I used to have a lot of time on my hands and enjoyed messing around with the system, tweaking every last thing... Nowadays i have Ubuntu and OSX as my workstation systems... They work out of the box and present very little hassle, but the underlying power and flexibility is there incase i need to do something obscure. I do find OSX's lack of package management extremely limiting tho, apple should port the iphone app store to desktop osx, but make it apt compatible so it's possible and easy to add third party repositories...

Re:of course it means something numbnuts

[grumbel]

The question is, what market share is required to achieve this?

I doubt that it has much to do with market share, it seems more to be an issue with Linux being pretty much incompatible with how hardware manufacturers like to ship their drivers. Most drivers in the Windows world are not just drivers, they come bundled with a whole bunch of software and stuff that is tied to the specific piece of hardware (i.e. standard Windows Logitech mouse driver is 50MB instead of a few KB). A clean separation between the code that makes your hardware work on all that other additional software doesn't really exit, because the supplied software plays a big part in the marketing and feature lists you find on the box.

I think to get proper Linux support hardware vendors would first need to learn that their job is to produce hardware, not software. Once thats done they might have less problems with releasing specs, but I somewhat doubt that this is going to happen anytime soon because of Linux. The best thing for Linux hardware support in the end are really the open standards. Any USB HID or storage device works on Linux out of the box, not because the hardware vendor cared about Linux, but because he implemented the spec. The more specs we have for common hardware, the better the Linux support will be.

Quick response: No

[Drinking Bleach]

To the developers, at least, marketshare is absolutely irrelevant to their efforts. With some exceptions, the GNU/Linux systems is largely built to benefit the developers themselves, and if other people find it useful, good for them.

Re:Quick response: No

[arminw]

...To the developers, at least, marketshare is absolutely irrelevant to their efforts....

That maybe true to those dedicated souls who give time and effort for free to develop the software, but not for the companies who make the hardware. They have to provide support for their products. Building up an entire support team for such a small share of units sold is disproportionately expensive and will not be done by anyone who wants to make a profit. For all products, with computers no exception, most people look to the manufacturer to address an eventual problem. Ordinary users are not sophisticated enough to determine whether the problem is with the software or with the hardware. They will instinctively call the manufacturer of the computer box and expect help. Giving this help will cost a manufacturer a sizable bundle of money.

Re:Quick response: No

[Jurily]

To the developers, at least, marketshare is absolutely irrelevant to their efforts.

Nobody wants to program a user application for a platform without users. Except as a training excercise, perhaps.

Well...

[techwizrd]

These statistics seem to a be a bit flawed. Windows has 90% of the market, Mac OS X has 9%, and Linux has 1%. However, Linux is heavily used in servers, handhelds, and other devices. Not to mention, the fact that there is no way reliable way to track Linux installs (100s of dstributions with users installing everywhere and no phoning home to report it).

I don't think this statistic is meaningful. I think Linux should keep chugging along and show the world that freedom, volunteers, and good will can equal money. Something to tip the scales...

It's not meaningless at all

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The quote from TFA misses the point entirely. It's not about there "being only one," it's about there being enough users to make Linux (or any OS that isn't from Microsoft) a viable alternative to Windows. If a particular OS has 0.0001% or 0.01% or even 0.1% market share, very few developers are going to develop for that OS. You won't be able to connect your machine running that OS to anyone's network, even if it's technically capable of making the connection, because IT will be paranoid about this unknown platform. Etc. But if you reach 1% or more, that's kind of a magic number. You may still be seen as kind of weird for not following the crowd, but you'll be able to use your computer for the same tasks for which everyone else uses theirs.

I'd say 1% is about what any non-Windows OS needs, as long as the aggregate of "alternative" OSes stays above 5% or so, as is currently the case with Linux + OS X. When the number gets significantly below that, as it did in the days before Linux took off and when you couldn't say "Apple" without first saying "beleaguered," things are pretty rough for anyone who's not running Windows on the desktop, using IE for the web, and writing everything in Word.

Is it really that little?

[Casandro]

I mean, how is that measured? I mean it certainly must be way more. Do they measure commercial sales of distributions? Well that's certainly misleading. For example I have a laptop which came with a Windows XP license, now it runs Ubuntu. Few Linux users actually buy their distribution and the amount of them has decreased over the years. That would also explain why the market share of Macs seems to be so large. There they simply could count the sold machines.

Measuring the user-agent strings of web-browsers also isn't verry precise as different sites tend to attract different kinds of users.

Overall Marketshare?

[Rycross]

Overall marketshare? I'm highly doubtful that a 1% marketshare includes servers, much less all the Linux-powered devices (like my router) out there.

I don't think I've ever seen an OS marketshare report that wasn't flawed in some way.

Re:My gut says about 5%

[phantomfive]

The overwhelming mainstream demand of Linux is that it become as much a clone of Windows as possible.

No no no!!! Please, if anyone gets anything from this let it be that Linux cannot be just a Windows clone, it has to be something better! Why would anyone go through the trouble of installing a completely different operating system that is exactly the same as the one they have? There HAS to be something extra, even for the average user.

Really, it shouldn't be too hard. Look at what Apple has been doing: they make little applications that draw people in, like photobooth. It is totally silly, and mostly useless, and really easy to make, but I've seen teenagers in the Apple store after school just taking pictures of themselves in photobooth. It's easy to get to and addictive.

Another example is time machine. It is simple, straightforward, and fun to use. It makes you WANT to go buy a second hard drive, just so you can look at the cool animation. Never mind that you've seen way cooler animations in made-for-TV movies, that animation is seductive.

The dock was the same way when it first came out, it bounced when you put your mouse by it. It was fun to play with. It drew you in. Linux needs to draw you in.

And it can. Linux has Compiz, which is graphically the most impressive of any desktop. KDE has some great artists. Now they just need the focus to make Linux sticky, make it draw you in, make you feel happy when you look at the screen. That's what Linux needs to do. Be better than Windows.

1% is meaningful as a milestone

[mysidia]

You really have to cross 1% before you can achieve better proportions like 100%.

Market share implies usefulness, or that people use, want to use, or are forced into using it.

For Linux to have 1% market usage would mean that there is also a decent sized pool for community.

A 98% market share for Linux would be great; it would mean a massive pool of users to form community, to find issues, test new versions, etc.

Resulting in an even better product that more people will find beneficial and easy to use in an advantageous way.

The trend is more useful than the absolute value

[gdshaw]

I agree completely that you cannot place much trust in the percentage, for all of the reasons that get mentioned whenever we talk about OS or browser market share.

The trend, however, is much more interesting because it cancels out much of the systematic bias that will be present in any given series of results.

In this particular case Linux shows a fairly steady increase from 0.43% to 1.02% over the last two years, a compound annual growth rate of about 50% (albeit from a low starting point). I think that's good news.

(In fact the actual figure may be even better than that, because there was a suspicious 25% decline in October 2008. It could be that they changed methodology in some way, perhaps by reclassifying one of the embedded Linux-based platforms, because that month's change stands out as being very unusual.)

of course it's meaningful

[shish]

It means "the overall share of the market". If you're using it to measure quality or reliability or developer's dick size then you're doing it wrong, and that's not the statistic's fault...