Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet) [LWN.net]

Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

Posted Jan 16, 2003 8:43 UTC (Thu) by webinfo (guest, #9107)
In reply to: Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet) by beejaybee
Parent article: Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)

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."

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