Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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}$/
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.)
Absolutely. I want to be able to walk into a store, buy some random piece of hardware and be absolutely sure that it will work under Linux. I don't care how many people use Linux, I just want to make my own personal choice to use it easier.
The question is, what market share is required to achieve this? I'm betting it's fairly low, I mean, even at 1% we are starting to see some traction. Boxes with Linux pre-installed are available from major manufacturers (albeit in a limited and hidden manner), more and more hardware makers are starting to produce drivers or release specs so the community can (I'm looking at ATI here).
If we are getting all this at 1%, then surely full-support can't need a huge amount more, I'd guess at 10% we should be good. How long it will take to get there is another question.
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.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.