"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar)

What's Apple's marketshare in terms of OEM sales for the second quarter ? http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/17/apple-climbs-to-th...

In that article: 1.4 Million units SOLD in the second quarter equates to 8.5% market share. And that's the high estimate for Apple.

So how's Asus doing with its eee?
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/18560/19584/...

They expect to hit 5 million units SOLD for 2008. That's just the eee netbooks. Thats 1.25 million eee netbooks a quarter on average. So right now is the the Asus eee product line mainstream? That puts its squarely on par with Apple's total desktop and laptop sales. How many of those eee units are running Xandros? Half? 3/4? Just counting the default Xandros installs on the eee we are halfway to Apple's marketshare.

Right now the Xandros linux distribution is THE mainstream distribution because its on the Asus eee. Asus has made linux mainstrain and they continue to do it. And that's not even counting the Linpus distribution on the Acer Aspire one.

Let's look at third quarter netbook sales forecasts:
http://www.eeextra.com/news/netbook-sales-figures-for-q3-...

Taken together Asus and Acer crush everyone else. How much of those sales in that table are linux pre-installs? Half? How many of them are Ubuntu pre-installs? Just the Dell ones?

The Dell forecast comes in at 0.16 million. Dell netbook retails sales is only forecasted slightly ahead of OLPC (running a Fedora derivative.) I find that mind-boggling really. the OLPC, a non-commercial offering, is slightly behind the Dell retail netbook sales forecast. Are we ever going to see hard numbers for the comprehensive Ubuntu Dell pre-install sales figures? Without those numbers can we really say anything about Ubuntu's OEM marketshare compared to Xandros or Linpus? Are Asus and Acer that much more effective at retail sales than Dell in the emerging netbook market?

If you consider netbooks as more than a bubble market, and even if you factor in higher rates of return that may or may not be happening...Linux based operating systems are mainstream right now. Even though the distributions which get the most press and have the most brand recognition as operating systems aren't leading the stats.

Asus and Acer are out in front with differentiated linux distributions. It's obvious why Canonical is chasing the evolving netbook market, we simply do not know yet how large the marketspace for these things are. It's a gold rush. The netbook market is going to be a bloodbath next year as the market is flooded with more competition looking to take market share aware from Asus and Acer. A few OEM companies are going to make big dollars up until the market is saturated with competition and the product die-off starts. Asus and Acer have shown linux can gain traction there and presumable turn a profit. But to suggest that Ubuntu is leading the effort there is a bit...revisionist. If anything Canonical has to be concerned that they'll come to the market too late, with the wrong OEM partner. Is Dell the right OEM partner in the race to the bottom?

Canonical may be able to do a good sales pitch and convince OEMs its worth paying for engineering services and to get OEMs like Asus and Acer to shell out for use of the Ubuntu brand as a customized pre-install in the next round of competition in the race to the netbook pricing bottom. But Xandros and Linpus are already there, making linux mainstream doing it their way on their terms without the strength of the Ubuntu brand to bolster their engineering services pitch. Maybe at the end of the day, Xandros and Linpus actually do OEM engineering and support better than Canonical regardless of brand recognition.

Btw, Xandros is hiring multiple kernel developers:
http://www.xandros.com/about/careers/kernel_dev.html
Hopefully they will participate in upstream development.
I think it only fair that Xandros get held to the fire of upstream participation as well.

An OEM netbook win for Ubuntu at this point in this space is more about an economic win for Canonical's business plan than a win for linux. Xandros and Linpus are business entities..directly competing with Canonical in the OEM engineering and customization services space. If either Canonical or Xandros or Linpus win more OEM support moving forward its a win for mainstreaming linux. But credit where credit is due... based on existing sales figures and forecasts that we have right now..Xandros and Linpus are leading the way and putting linux squarely in the mainstream of OEM unit sales....not Ubuntu....not Fedora. Makes you wonder why aren't we talking about Xandros more in the press.

The reality is, the operating system brand may not matter in the long run if we are moving more and more to a market dominated by mobile "devices" of varying shapes and sizes. The winning OEM model maybe to differentiate and to customize the software interface compared to its hardware competitors and to sale that tweaked interface as a differentiated advantage of the device.

If that's true, the question for OEM's becomes not if they will be using linux. They will, because open source solutions makes that sort of customization possible in a way that closed solutions can't. The question for them will be how to pay for that engineering and customization work. Can someone like Canonical make a business out of providing better operating system engineering services value to OEMs than other competitors or better value than the OEMs could do on their own?

And the question for the larger ecosystem is how do we get those OEMs to contribute back to the upstream projects. That's a toughy. If the market pressure on OEMs is to differentiate products, how do we encourage them to collaborate on the underlying functionality?

-jef