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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.'"
What? This directly contradicts the widely-known fact that Linux is The Highlander of operating systems.
slashdot, missing the point as usual....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
both reveal some interesting things but may hide the essential."
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...
The market share is not fragmented so evenly as the summary suggests. The majority of the market share is composed of people who only check email, browse the web, etc. I have heard plenty of stories of these people moving seamlessly from Windows to Linux. Linux should be aiming specifically for this group of people because they do not need the proprietary software that musicians/artists/etc. would otherwise need. All their needs can easily be satisfied with Firefox and Thunderbird. There is not much more to the data point than how many people have experienced Linux and found that it satisfied all their needs without the heavy price they must otherwise pay to Microsoft. What Linux needs to do is get itself out there through advertisements, etc. There needs to be more commercials on television like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistically_significant>
"In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. "A statistically significant difference" simply means there is statistical evidence that there is a difference; it does not mean the difference is necessarily large, important, or significant in the common meaning of the word....
The significance level is usually represented by the Greek symbol, (alpha). Popular levels of significance are 5%, 1% and 0.1%. If a test of significance gives a p-value lower than the -level, the null hypothesis is rejected...."
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.
I don't know, I don't think Linux has a huge marketshare on the desktop, it's probably a few percent in corporate desktops and less than one percent for home desktops. That being said Linux is probably has more total OS installs that WIndows, all the virtual hosts and ubiquitous embedded devices that have been moving over to Linux in droves add up to a ton of actual usage.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
For some intuitive, illogical reason, I feel as though 5% is probably a reasonable current number where desktop Linux is concerned.
Virtually the only major growth going forward is going to be with Ubuntu. There simply isn't any other distro out there which mimics Windows closely enough for the Lloyd Christmas demographic to be happy with it. So in mainstream terms, we're going to have a Ubuntu monoculture; to the uneducated, Ubuntu and Linux will become synonyms.
I think however that it's too early to tell, at this point, what longer term effect Ubuntu's mainstream success will have on the broader Linux community. I've already seen some vague suggestions online that in some cases Ubuntu acts as a gateway drug for Linux; Ubuntu is used at first, and then as a user learns more, and develops more confidence, they sometimes move somewhere else, distro-wise. I don't think this happens a lot, though; something tells me that with most people, Ubuntu's long-term retention rate will be high, with most staying in GNOME and avoiding the CLI more or less completely.
The overwhelming mainstream demand of Linux is that it become as much a clone of Windows as possible. I believe that this will greatly damage Linux's technical integrity long term, which is why I've moved to FreeBSD, which I am hoping will remain relatively immune from the insistent screaming of Windows refugees for a monetarily free XP clone. I had one Ubuntu user inform me on IRC, only a few hours ago, that Linux's primary reason for existence was to apparently provide users like her with only a marginally more stable Windows clone; it is interesting just how arrogant and forceful Windows refugees are becoming with this demand.
Of course, what I still haven't figured out is why those people who consider it important for Linux to become mainstream, do feel such a desperate need for that to happen. The one thing I can promise you is that mainstream adoption will not ultimately do good things for Linux; it is a fundamental law in my mind that the quality of any given thing is inversely proportional to its' degree of popularity.
Apart from anything else, Windows refugees generally have absolutely no clue what they are doing where serious software development is concerned. As more ex-Windows users migrate to Linux, there is, I feel, sound cause for therefore believing that Linux's overall code quality will begin to drop. The only thing Windows users care about is that computer use is, "easy." They don't know or care about stability, security, or hardware efficiency, and they also don't understand that a severe tradeoff nearly always exists between robustness and usability at the best of times.
The facts that Slackware is a rock-solid server distro, but not used much on the desktop, while Ubuntu is a nightmare in technical terms, but is the primary desktop distro, are not coincidences. Robustness and extreme usability are virtually mutually exclusive. For one to be present, the other must go by definition.
Actually, there is no meaningful way to accurately measure how many people (or businesses) are using Linux, or Windows, or BSD. So "market share" is meaningless. Its just a statistic that marketing departments can twist to sound however they want it to sound.
So...
We trust the guy who "just says so" over the guys who collect and analize the data and compare the results for a living?
Sorry bro "just cause" doesn't cut it when there are mountains of data proving you wrong.
Linux extremely popular in a few areas: network backbones, pure data crunching applications (often a windows application passes data to a linux server farm for processing), web server applications where up-front OS cost is a significant portion of the cost (else the MS server product is often cheaper in the long run), web server applications that require very custom applications and very fine OS control, very small embedded hardware applications, etc. For a lot of these applications I'd wager linux has 50/50 market share with microsoft (roughly, novel still has a portion of the server market, and apple has a very small portion as well). In a few areas like embedded apps, MS has very little market share, and Linux is probably in the 50-70% range, maybe even higher.
However, ALL of those applications are trounced by the desktop PC market, and MS still owns that hands down, even with Macs at 9%. 1% is not at all unbelievable for Linux, MS has its hands in almost everything, and has very good products that are strong competitors in almost every catagory. Linux doesn't even compare, it's a niche OS used for niche applications and it is very very good at filling most all niche needs. Unfortunately "Niche" is just everything MS doesn't dominate.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Other sources estimated the number to be 5% or even 6%. Which just goes to show how statistics can easily be used in ways that are misleading or distorted.
But this also bears examining: 1% (or 5% or 6%) of what OS market? Linux is sure as hell a lot higher than that in the server market, and if you are talking about internet servers, higher still.
So, maybe it doesn't have wonderful desktop penetration yet. But I bet it's higher than those statistics say! My bet is that Linux is the secondary OS for an awful lot of people, often via dual-booting. Just as "one and one only" voting has been shown to be inferior to "instant runoff" and other voting methods, saying that people have only "this or that" OS does not present an accurate picture of the landscape.
Because there are sound commercial reasons to do so.
Which vary in each specific instance, while the figure itself remains largely unchanged.
It boils down to human counting systems with only three or four distinct values: 0%, 1%, 90%, 99% aka nobody, hardly anybody, most people, almost everyone.
When you cite 1% it spares you from deciding whether to write "hardly anyone" or "a tenacious few". For exponential distributions, 1% is the glass half-full point: the optimists read that as the upward inflection of immanent domination; status-quo pessimists read that as annoying cohort who forgot to take their meds.
If you write "5% of desktops run Linux", it's like saying the glass is 5/8s full. It only complicates the knee-jerk response.
If some materials science wonk invents an exotic new material which they have absolutely no idea how to commercialize, but raised money anyway, the obligatory quote is that commercial products will be available "in five years". It's kinda PR speak for "don't call us, we'll call you, if we ever get our shit together".
There are sound reasons not to take precision too seriously.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/nitpicking_omega_b_discovery
Seriously, computing is about more than just desktop users.
How do various hobbyists, and I.T. professionals use Linux? It would be easier to count the niches that Linux is not filling. According to Netcraft, Apache still had over 50% web server market share, while IIS only had 30% in April 2009. I am sure there are some people running Apache on Windows, but I would venture a guess that it is not the majority.
Even webserver market share does not represent the whole server market share. Approximately 40% of all hardware in the server room where I work run Linux in some form, only 25% of all the servers run Linux. There are more than a dozen third party network appliances in this room. Third party examples I can think of are load balancers, spam firewalls, content servers, and NAS filers. I cannot think of one third party Windows Server based appliance in our server room, aside from servers. I am sure there are Windows appliances out there, just not in our server room. If it is part of Microsoft's mission to lock customers in to commodity desktop and server hardware, that is not something that really scales for vendors designing and selling specialized appliances and hardware.
How much Internet infrastructure runs on Linux? I wonder what the percentage of postfix/sendmail servers on Linux versus Exchange servers on Windows is? What is the number of external BIND DNS servers on Linux, versus external Windows DNS servers. What is the market share of Linux iptables/tc routers, load balancers, VPN gateways, or 3rd party appliance running Linux) versus Windows RRAS routers used in small and midsize offices? How many companies are using Asterisk versus the number of companies using Microsoft Office Communicator Suite (Not sure OCS qualifies as a PBX, though)? How many companies are virtualizing their data centers with VMWare ESX, Xen, or KVM, all running on Linux versus Microsoft HyperV?
How many consumer electronics devices have popped up with Linux on them, versus Windows? I can probably name 20 devices with an ARM processor, and some version of Linux running on it. Here is a short list: Linksys Wireless routers, webcams, Tivo, Roku, Netgear ReadyNas, Sony flatscreen televisions, POS terminals, etc. Windows mobile has notably made its way onto mobile phones and Wasp barcode scanners.
How about high-performance computing? How many Rocks clusters, and render farms are built on Linux versus Windows HPC servers?
Seriously who cares if Linux isn't prevalent on the desktop. Linux has filled every other niche, besides the desktop computer, six ways to Sunday. While Microsoft and Apple are laughing at a 1% desktop share, Linux is taking over every other niche which it is able to quickly evolve and adapt. World domination fast, indeed.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
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.
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.)
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...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
It would be interesting to come up with a metric that evaluated "real" work done under each platform. The numbers might be surprising.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Compare this (this article is based on this data):
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9
which doesn't give any hint how the data has been obtained with this:
http://www.heise.de/open/Linux-knackt-auf-dem-Desktop-die-1-Prozent-Marke--/news/meldung/137137
(Win XP: 55.5%, Linux: 14.8%, Vista: 14,4%, Apple: 7,7%)
with this:
http://www.handy-mc.de/handy-bestenliste/toplist-bewertung.html
Toshiba Portege G910 (#1), a handy which doesn't exist yet, is much more popular than the iPhone (#200).
There is a lot of nonsense floating around. Do not trust this data.
It is meaningful if you want to draw the attention of hardware manufacturers and have them develop drivers.
I switched to OS X 13 months ago, and I honestly don't see a point in switching to Linux as my primary system (I'm a software developer, mostly working in Java).
The only reason one would do that would be philosophical, rather than practical. I use Linux of course, but I don't miss anything available on Linux using OS X. But if I were to switch to Linux I would miss quite a few things (mostly having to do with images and video and Nikon and Canon software support for Linux in particular. Of course there is the issue of Photoshop and Adobe video suite).
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Everyone knows Linux has 10% market share worldwide.
Those 1% are from broken statistics. Even for just the US they're wrong.
Linux has enough market share that there are 10s of thousands of people supporting it. Linux has enough market share that I get an outstanding Desktop OS. An OS that I gladly pay for through donations and purchasing vendor products. Linux has enough market share to provide me with the most stable, safe and feature rich platform available. It has enough market share that Linksys, nVidia and other high-end hardware manufactures support it.
1%, 10% or 90%... Linux has enough market share for me.
-[d]-