same old nit
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Apr 02, 2008 3:02 PM EDT |
Overall it's a good article, but I sure get tired of the 2% market share figure getting parroted. At least the author cites Gartner:Quoting: Linux on the desktop doesn't have to take off like crazy to really start to matter. Of the 981 million PCs in existence worldwide last year, 1.7 percent ran Linux, according to Gartner Inc. That sounds paltry. But Apple's Mac operating system accounted for just 2.5 percent, and Apple is considered a significant, influential alternative to Windows. What is Gartner measuring? I bet my granny's garter that they're counting tier 1 OEM sales only, and not re-purposed PCs or small independent vendors like ZaReason or Penguin Computing or Emperor Linux, which I'll bet my grampy's athletic supporter is a figure several times larger. Something else that occurs to me, perhaps part of the reason that Apple's 2.5% is so influential is because they have a partnership with Microsoft, however uneasy it may be. Linux, on the other hand, is directly in the Borg's cross-hairs and is marked for destruction. |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 02, 2008 4:16 PM EDT |
Microsoft and Apple have a very cozy, mutually beneficial thing going on, no question. |
| techiem2 Apr 02, 2008 4:52 PM EDT |
On a semi-related note: My boss told me the other day that when he was on the phone with our Dell rep, he asked him what % of the servers they sell run Linux. The rep told him at least 25%. So you have 25% of server sales preloaded with Linux, plus any sold with Windows that get nuked and Linux installed, plus any non-os server sales (assuming they do that) that get Linux installed. |
| tracyanne Apr 02, 2008 7:55 PM EDT |
Quoting:but I sure get tired of the 2% market share figure getting parroted It has to be higher, for example every computer I have, and in fact every computer I've rebuilt and sold, and indeed every computer I've rebuilt for it's owner, would have been counted as a Microsoft sale, simply because they had a Microsoft OS on them at the time of Sale. I am quite sure that the numbers of Linux desktops is at least as high as that of Mac desktops, and of course there are the Macs that have been converted to Linux, they too don't show up as Linux desktops in any count. |
| nikkels Apr 02, 2008 7:59 PM EDT |
I wished that someone wrote an article about market share. When I was In school it was something in the line of Amount of products legally sold and maintained/repaire/serviced by the vendor or representative of the product. Take into consideration that windows has a 50% piracy rate, the market share can not be 90%. What has changed in the definition of market share in the 50 years I wasn't in school ? Of course, writing an article like that in any form could be fuel for the 3th world War :-) |
| tracyanne Apr 02, 2008 8:01 PM EDT |
3rd World War. But Please write it. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 02, 2008 8:26 PM EDT |
The problem with such an article is that you'd want to present better data. So you come back to the age old problem, how do you measure Linux market share? |
| nikkels Apr 02, 2008 9:27 PM EDT |
Sander, I actually wrote it half joking.
I had this discussion before on a Linux Forum.
We went casual about it...no heated arguments
There it was pointed out that technically I may be right, but the interpretation from the publics viewpoint would make my point moot You don't need really a lot on linux. What you need to prove is that pirated copies of Windows are not legal and are not part of the market share, as they are not sold, supported, maintained by the vendor So, the following is a very rough presentation. There are 1000 OSes on all 1000 PCs in the world. 60% is pirated and illegal , so they can not be counted in market share. That leaves us 400 units. MS has 350...Unix/linux has 20 and Mac has 30 ( total 400 ) Since there are 1000 OSes out, and MS has only 350, I count this as 35% market share for MS As you see, it's not about how much market share linux has, but about how much MS really has ( 90% or my 35% ) END Yes, I am still celebrating 1st April, but, wouldn't it be wonderful if someone could write this on a more technical way. Then publish it under the tittle "" MS market share dropped to 35% "" I bet that most people will buy it. |
| gus3 Apr 02, 2008 11:00 PM EDT |
"MS market share re-evaluated to 35%" Highlight the bogus analysis. |
| jdixon Apr 03, 2008 6:50 AM EDT |
> for example every computer I have, and in fact every computer I've rebuilt and sold, and indeed every computer I've rebuilt for it's owner, would have been counted as a Microsoft sale, simply because they had a Microsoft OS on them at the time of Sale. Whereas none of my machines would show up at all, as they were all home assembled from barebone kits and had no OS installed. |
| NoDough Apr 03, 2008 7:05 AM EDT |
Quoting:There are 1000 OSes on all 1000 PCs in the world. 60% is pirated and illegal , so they can not be counted in market share. Quoting:Since there are 1000 OSes out, and MS has only 350, I count this as 35% market share for MS First you excluded the 60% from market share, then you included it in order to mitigate Microsoft's percentage. Seems a little dicey to me. |
| jdixon Apr 03, 2008 7:13 AM EDT |
> First you excluded the 60% from market share... No. He excluded it from Microsoft's market share, but not the total market. It's a separate category, illegal installs, which (with his figures) have a 60% market share. |
| number6x Apr 03, 2008 7:29 AM EDT |
You have to consider the double counted Windows machines as well. I had a compaq box on my desktop at my last client that had an OEM Windows 98 sticker on it. Add 1 to Windows sales. As soon as the client's IT department unpacked it they put a Ghosted copy of Windows XP professional on the machine set up to their corporate IT standards. They have a corporate license for Windows XP Pro, and all copies are legal and registered with their local MS server. The desktop never ran Windows 98. Add 1 to Windows sales. One box, one user (at a time consultants come and go), two sales of Windows. That inflates market share. I would expect many corporations re-install a copy of Windows over the installed copy that ships on the machine doubling many sales of Windows. |
| jdixon Apr 03, 2008 8:00 AM EDT |
> I would expect many corporations re-install a copy of Windows over the installed copy that ships on the machine doubling many sales of Windows. Almost all large companies do so. They install their corporate licensed version and blow away the oem version. |
| dinotrac Apr 03, 2008 9:02 AM EDT |
>Almost all large companies do so. They install their corporate licensed version and blow away the oem version. If they are counting shipped boxes for the market share numbers, that will not have an effect. The OS shipped gets counted, the OS installed does not. |
| jdixon Apr 03, 2008 9:38 AM EDT |
> f they are counting shipped boxes for the market share numbers, that will not have an effect. Yeah. If they're getting their numbers from the box manufacturers, those won't show up. If they're getting them from Microsoft, they will. Since we don't know which it is, there's no way to know. Virtual machines also throw a monkey wrench into the works. |
| montezuma Apr 03, 2008 10:03 AM EDT |
One way to figure it out might be via an opinion poll mechanism. Survey 1000 random individuals and then 1000 random businesses. This can be done cheaply using robocalls (ask Rasmussen). At the very least you would get a totally independent new dataset to argue about ;-) |
| tracyanne Apr 03, 2008 12:16 PM EDT |
Probably the only people who have any real idea of how many OEMs actually get used as Windows machines are Microsoft. After all the OS has to be activated. The difference between sold boxes and activated machines is the real number of Microsoft boxes. It can be assumed that the majority of the non activated machines are now Linux boxes. So Microsoft probably have a very good idea of what Linux market share actually is. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 03, 2008 1:40 PM EDT |
tracyanne: MS will still be far off. Many Linux computers did run Windows at some point in the past. Linux folk are very good at taking hardware that other people don't want anymore and running it for years afterwards. And when we do buy new hardware then we usually prefer not to pay the MS tax. So we build our own. And don't forget there are a lot of dual booters out there. They may never actually boot into Windows, but they do have it. Or you see people buying an XP box, installing Linux and then turn the XP partition into a virtual machine. |
| tuxchick Apr 03, 2008 1:52 PM EDT |
True, getting an accurate number is nearly impossible. But getting better numbers than Gartner or Asay seems obvious and not that hard. |
| jdixon Apr 03, 2008 1:53 PM EDT |
> The difference between sold boxes and activated machines is the real number of Microsoft boxes. No. The majority of non-activated boxes are probably running hacked versions of Windows. I'd guess illegal installs of Windows outnumber Linux installs by at least 2 to 1. |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 03, 2008 3:09 PM EDT |
I don't think we need "numbers" so much as concrete evidence that boxes are shipping with Linux or no OS. If the number of people paying the MS tax begins to go down, then we'll know something. Having Dell put Ubuntu on less than 1 percent of their boxes is one thing, but having 100 percent of Everex Cloudbooks, 100 percent (though probably dropping) of ASUS Eees, etc., is a big deal. When a guy like the WSJ's Walt Mossberg does an open-source review, actually likes what he sees, and begins using it all the time, then we're getting somewhere. When Mr. Missing Manual, David Pogue of the NYT, finds a FOSS desktop he likes and writes a damn Missing Manual about it, that's another step. Having U.S. senators, House members, even U.S. presidents, aware of the FOSS vs.proprietary situation and how much of even the U.S. government is growing to depend on FOSS (NASA, U.S. Army, etc.), and talking about it, then we're getting somewhere. I don't have my head in the sand, by any means, but when somebody offers me a complete operating system that's resistant to viruses and all sorts of malicious stuff out there, ships with all the applications I want and doesn't make me steal anything or part with thousands of dollars to get it, and lets me run it on old, new or obscure hardware, there's just no choice but to embrace it wholeheartedly. |
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