Market Shares at Robert Pogson

While fans of M$ claim market shares for M$ of 91% and more realistic webstats show 86%, Treflis has estimated the current market share is about 75% (Forbes) and has been trending down. The current web stats lag reality in the market place because current web stats are generated by PCs that have shipped years ago.

We know Apple ships about 4% of PCs shipped per annum (still not in top 10), so the other 20% could be shipping to folks with portable licences likely for XP that they do not have to buy again, illegal installation (no licence), thin clients and GNU/Linux or other OS. That’s a huge slice of the pie in which GNU/Linux can obviously grow. Then there is the huge number of P4ish XP machines that can be installed of GNU/Linux. 50% of all on-line machines by most estimates run XP and likely most of them will not be scrapped. They can run for years more as thin clients or GNU/Linux machines.

Expect M$’s unit share shipped to continue falling and GNU/Linux’s share to rise dramatically in the next few years.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

3 Responses to “Market Shares”

Feed for this Entry

1 ray Dec 12th, 2010 at 9:02 am

The last time I checked, OS marketshare and PC shipped per annum are different things.
2 Robert Pogson Dec 12th, 2010 at 9:21 am

Nope, just two different means of measuring the same thing. You can measure the speed of a car in miles per hour or kilometres per hour or how long it takes to go from A to B.

Either way, I would like to know how much of the potential utilization of GNU/Linux is actually happening. One way to estimate that is to count down from the space actually utilized by that other OS and people are publishing more or less good numbers for that and not for GNU/Linux. It’s the best we can do.

There are two major trends complicating this. One is that thin clients are used to reach servers and applications run on that other OS and the thin client may have a different OS not registered in web stats. My thin clients connect to the terminal server. The terminal server connects to the web site. So, my 20 thin clients, running GNU/Linux are not counted in w3schools.com stats. This week all of my computer students will visit w3schools.com to learn HTML. Thin client usage is growing rapidly as the “virtual desktop” arrives. Another is that some web stats do not distinguish mobile OS or do not categorize GNU/Linux and Android together. Android is becoming larger than GNU/Linux on desktop and notebooks this year. The annual production of Android smart-thingies is about the same as the current total share of GNU/Linux personal computers. This means GNU/Linux share is exploding and we do not have a good measure of the total.
3 oldman Dec 15th, 2010 at 11:28 am

“This means GNU/Linux share is exploding and we do not have a good measure of the total.”

How do you figure this Pog? Just because Android was fabricated on top of a modified Linux code base does not make it Linux, And it is a very good bet that no Android based device will be able to run any of the useful FOSS desktop applications in their current form.