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Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 11, 2003 9:45 UTC (Sat) by landley (guest, #6789)
Parent article: Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Linux will do well in servers. In 2003. Well, it's nice to see Goldman Sachs going out on a limb with this prediction business, isn't it?

The interesting question is when will the Linux desktop market become bigger than the Macintosh desktop market? (And for "desktop" here think "laptop", since low-end desktop systems are at $200 each and dropping. I used to have a VCR that cost more than that. The niche between "power laptop" and "high-end monster workstation" is in the process of drying up and blowing away. Apple sells lots and lots of powerbook variants. Laptops are the market Linux has to crack, and desktops will take care of themselves...)

I'll stop now.


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Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 11, 2003 16:44 UTC (Sat) by aotheoverlord (guest, #3993) [Link]

I think you'll find that according to IDC, Linux has already superceded the Mac as the #2 desktop...

Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 13, 2003 19:27 UTC (Mon) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

Really? Then why is MacOS so far ahead of Linux (five times the market share) according to the Google Zeitgeist?

(Unfortunately, the OS list and chart were last updated in 9-01, but is visible in the archives. Anyone know why they pulled that chart?)

Yes, I know, they aren't measuring market share of new installations, but for most practical applications what matters is fraction of installed base of desktop systems, and that's roughly what this shows. I do think it's funny that Windows 98 was so far ahead of the newer Windowses at last update...

Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 14, 2003 9:32 UTC (Tue) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

It's hard to count linux desktops installed - lots of people never pay or advertise in any other way the fact that they are using a linux desktop system. Mac desktop usage can easily be (over)estimated by sales of Mac systems. Windows desktop usage can easily be (badly over)estimated by sales of "Wintel" PCs.

My guess is that Google Zeitgeist measured linux usage by sales of boxed linux sets from the "major players" and compared that with sales of Mac systems.

Don't trust anyone's figures unless they're truly independent of sales outlets.

Other people may well get different results, and I certainly do _not_ condone scanning random address spaces. However, if I run "nmap -O" on my employer's address space, during prime time, I see about 10 times as many Windows systems as linux systems, with Sun Solaris running at about half the level of linux, Netware about half the level of Solaris and everything else (including Macintosh, but ignoring embedded systems like network printers, switches, routers etc.) just the odd few. This measure may underestimate the proportion of Windows & Macintosh systems, since my impression is that senior staff who are less likely to actually have their system running are very likely to have Windows or Mac OS installed, and very unlikely to be linux users. Once there is significant penetration of linux on the desktop (& notebook) systems of staff at a senior executive level, world domination is just around the corner!

As it happens my job description (as security coordinator for a university) specifically includes scanning our local address space for vulnerabilities. I would _strongly_ advise anyone wishing to check my figures against their own to check that you have proper authority to scan any systems that you do not _personally_ administer. Unauthorized scanning is probably a disciplinary offence, even if it is not specifically outlawed in your jurisdiction.

As for "fearing the penguin" - Microsoft should have _nothing_ to fear, since they are so convinced that their system is superior in every way. So just why are they so fearful?

Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 16, 2003 8:43 UTC (Thu) by webinfo (guest, #9107) [Link]

Macintosh 2.61%, Linux .27%, Solaris .08%, FreeBSD .01%, all others less than .01% each -- for Jan 14th, 2003

There are many caveats, please read on ...

Hi - I work for WebSideStory. We provide web stats in an ASP model to a large group of the very highly trafficked web sites on the net - E.g. Disney, Best Buy, ESPN, Cisco, etc. Our big customers are largely US commercial web sites. We also provide service to medium, small and tiny web sites (we have a free product) all over the globe. This means that stats on 10 to 15 million unique web surfers a day pass through our software. We do this absolutely anonymously. No IP addresses or anything else personally identifiable is ever reported, just aggregated statistics.

10 to 15 million is a very large sample size. The percentages given above are what we saw yesterday, Jan 14th, 2003, from non-Microsoft operating systems. Keep in mind who our customers are and what sort of web surfers they will attract. For example German academic web surfers will certainly be under reported. Still, 10 to 15 million is a very large sample size.

Also keep in mind that this information only pertains to computers that people use to surf the web. Computers that are used strictly as servers (Microsoft or Linux) are not represented in the above stats.

With respect to the immediately preceding discussion of Mac vs. Linux market share the numbers that I give at the top won't be absolutely accurate. They're just an additional set of data points that should be factored into whatever guestimate the readers of this post would care to make about Mac vs. Linux market share. On the other hand retail box sales and/or the empirical observations of one administrator at a large academic institution won't be entirely accurate either.

As far as OSs go I'm relatively agnostic. On the other hand I certainly wish the open source forces the best of luck in their "quest."

Zeitgeist is not based on sales

Posted Jan 25, 2003 4:46 UTC (Sat) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

My guess is that Google Zeitgeist measured linux usage by sales of boxed linux sets from the "major players" and compared that with sales of Mac systems.

In General, the Google Zeitgeist keeps track of what people search for on Google.
In this case, it is showing data based on the browsers that are hitting Google, so it has nothing to do with sales figures.

see here:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-aug.html
and note it says "Operating Systems Used to Access Google".

Barry

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