The myth of 1% Linux market share.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:14:25PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> Its no where near 10% or 8%.
> In both neighborhoods i have lived in recently were I have talked to
> neighbors about computers, I was only linux user.
> In my family, cousins, uncles, parents, brothers, etc ....  3 linux
> users (that includes my wife), 4 mac users, ~100 windows users.
> In my job were i supported a linux boot CD/DVD to a work force of
> 100's (1000's but i actually only interfaced with 100's)  1 linux user
> (a son of one of employees),
> but that was of a populous made up of work at home people 80% female.
> HP published something way back about 2% linux users in tech support.
> Factoring outside NA, i would guess  +/- .5% , linux
> desktop/MID/netbook use at 2%,
> in NA i would guess 1% to 1.5% (+/- .5%).
> If it was anywhere close to 8-10%, you wouldn't call up rogers , or
> bell, or your bank , with tech support issues, and have them treat you
> like you were from another planet.
> As well ubuntu's download number, and other distro's even factoring in
> that one download, can led to a few installs, etc, etc, it is hard to
> get it above 2%.
> You can believe it is 8-10%, but I am 99.9999% sure you are way  way off base.
> If linux can dominate PVR, cellphones, MIDS, fridges, TV's, etc, etc,
> yeah it can grow to 10+%, but you are going outside the "desktop" use.
> The problem Linux has is, Vista was BAD, apple has marketing money,
> they went from <1% to 6-8% (with help too from their i-crap products),
> but Linux doesn't market, so they can't generally succeed in a space
> that involved marketing to gain growth.
> I bought Win7 because it is brutal using VISTA, and i have to use
> Visio because linux has nothing even in the same universe as Visio
> (unfortunately).
> And, guess what, Win7 is actually "OK", and I can tell you its now not
> a product that people have to escape from , if they are MS cool-aid
> drinkers.
> Win7 doesn't crash, its fairly fast startup/shutdown, sleep/hiber work
> well, security warning are reasonable. Having said that, there is bugs
> in Visio that they should fix,
> but that is an app. issue. Bottom line is Win7 is very usable, and
> Vista was not. There is no reason for your typical pablum feed Windows
> user to now seek out a alternative.
> Linux will only now gain traction in the small device (and embedded)
> market, which is probably why Mark Shuttleworth is doing the desktop
> gui changes to Ubuntu, its directed at that segment.
> In fact, I would guess Linux and especially Mac may actually lose some
> on the desktop going forward, as for the first time in a long time, MS
> isn't selling pure crap now.
> (and with intel catching up on the MID device chips, that opens up for
> Windows too unfortunately, makes having to use Win on MIDS less of a
> engineering issue).
> 
> Now having said all that, if Russia, and others really are
> standardizing their country on Linux, well obviously that will led to
> greater % of adoption in time as well.
> 
> anyways, its 2% (you heard it hear first)    :)
> 
> call up 500 people at random from a phone book of GTA, do a poll, if
> you get more then 10 linux users in that poll, i'd be really
> surprised.
> That is a way you can easily get your answer.

How many companies are using linux?  Where I am we have a lot of linux
machines.

How many servers?  Almost all wifi routers that people have out there
are linux.  How many android phones are there now?  How many little home
NAS units are out there?

Do you only count if it is a desktop machine?  If so, then the fact the
desktop may some day be irrelevant means you are measuring a useless
value.  it is just like people thinking x86 machines are the main thing
out there.  Well there were over a billion ARM devices sold this year.
More than half those were cell phones.  That's a lot of computers.

As for whether Microsoft is selling crap or not, who knows.  At least
they are charging way too much for a desktop OS.  You pay almost as much
for the OS as the hardware in many cases these days.  That's just wrong.
Unless you are a share holder in Microsoft, which is of course the only
case they care much about you.

Measuring desktop users reminds me of statistics on who plays computer
games.  People complain that there aren't enough women playing computer
games.  Of course when gathering statistics, the first thing they do
is say "flash games like bejewled and such aren't real games, so those
don't count'.  Well there goes 80% of the games being played and most of
the female gamers (who if you include those flash games actually outnumber
male computer game players).  So once you screw up the statistics, you
can then proceed to complain that there aren't enough female gamers.
Well duh, you just decided that the majority of them didn't count as
gamers.  So by deciding linux users don't count unless they are running
kde or gnome and firefox as a desktop machine and doing word processing,
well then you have in fact already decided what you wanted the result
to be.  Microsoft likes the desktop business and will fight hard to keep
that business even as google and others try to move applications online
and make the desktop irrelevant and only a user interface device.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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