TurboLinux Claims to be Number One OS in Japan

According to a company press release published today on Yahoo!Finance, TurboLinux is now the top-selling Japanese computer operating system. Not just the top-selling Linux distribution, but the top-selling OS, period, with sales almost as great as those of the Windows 98 commercial release and the Windows 98 commercial update combined. If only new commercial OS sales, not upgrades, are considered, things look even rosier for TurboLinux, which claims 24.09% of total market share as opposed to 13.25% for Win98 and 10.23% for Macintosh.

Comments

Re:First stage of World (well, desktop) Domination

[noom]

Considering that TurboLinux has such a large piece of the OS pie in Japan, it seems pretty obvious that Japan is being left in the dust. This basically means that perhaps the largest share of PC users in Japan are techies -- not normal end users. Lets face it -- most user don't need to use (nor would they be willing to learn to use) an operating environment as flexible and powerful as Linux.

I hate to say it, but Microsoft market share in Japan will probably be the best indicator of overall tech-savy in Japan because it means that more and more users are integrating PC use into their normal lives. When a country (at this point in the game, anyway) has such a large percentage of Linux users, it probably means that the market is so small that techies and hackers dominate the market for PCs while everyone else is satisfied to just own a PlayStation.

For the time being, Linux is still best suited to people who have the ability and prefer the flexibility of being able to fine tune an OS to their own needs. Most non-hobbiest (excluding work-related users) would still prefer a simple system that lets them email, chat, surf, etc... since they have little use for all of the free development tools and customization which makes Linux a better choice for techies (which is why I dumped MS long ago...).

In short, Japan is still serverly lagging in the 'consumer' (aka 'ignorant end user' (j/k)) market. Maybe they'll make it up by developing better add-ons to Linux to make it more '(End) User Friendly' but I'd bet that "Microsoft Consumer Operating Systems" will almost certainly remain a better fit for most people.

-NooM