It seems a little chauvinistic for you to assume that all these yellow, black, and brown emerging buyers are going to be satisfied with the cheapo products you see as existing under Microsoft’s abiity to supply, Mr. Pogson. The history of the world, including Africa and Asia has been for consumers to strive for the high-visibility products as soon as or even before they were affordable. Look at the Rolls-Royce limos immediately adopted by the African presidents and dictators or the Chinese demand for Western products after their acquisition of Hong Kong.

If you lived in the USA you would see the hordes of Indian managers and engineers with their H1B visas buying up the BMWs and houses in gated communities in the US, eschewing the old sod for the good life.

There are more consumers coming online in the next five years than have ever consumed in the planet’s history. They are well enough educated to make informed shopping decisions and they are motivated to catch up in IT. Many are skipping wired LANs because wireless is faster and cheaper. They are skipping the desktop PC because smart phones and tablets are smaller and cheaper. China now exceeds USA in consumption of PCs and smart phones. India has designed sub-$100 tablet for students. Brazil has rolled out 500K PCs running GNU/Linux for students. Russia is migrating schools and government offices to GNU/Linux. It goes on…

Literacy of the world:
“definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 83.7%
male: 88.3%
female: 79.2%
note: over two-thirds of the world’s 793 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are concentrated in three regions, the Arab states, South and West Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where around one-third of the men and half of all women are illiterate (2005-09 est.)”

see CIA World Factbook

Anyone CAN but next to no one DOES that, Mr. Pogson. You are imputing a miserly attitude onto the general population of consumers and that is simply not the case.

It is even more far-fetched to think that investors get into such things when buying stock. The vast majority of personal investors buy mutual funds and do not even look at the portfolios, much less the product market performance of individual products in individual companies. They just read the analysts’ reports, if they even do that much.

IDC provides reports for one purpose only, namely to sell the complete report to marketing professionals who use the information to define promotion plans.

Nonsense. Anyone (consumer, developer, investor, etc.) can study statistical data to judge:

• whether a particular technology has legs and should be bought/rented,
• which supplier has the most or adequate experience to be a reliable supplier,
• which stocks to buy, and
• which second-hand product will be current for a few years longer.

And what would you do differently if you did know, Mr. Pogson? That is the only real use of the market statistics, namely to make business decisions regarding product promotion plans. Leaders must behave differently from market laggers, you know. An accurate market survey can tell you where you are positioned and that will suggest various courses of action based on that position.

Here, though, the data is, as you point out, suspect to begin with and I doubt that many product vendors have a product promotion strategy that focuses on rural areas around Winnepeg. So no one is likely to care about this answer.

I don’t believe that any sort of analysis based on these statistics in regard to general OS usage are particularly informative unless you are for some reason highly interested in the class of user who might be hitting the Net Application customer level of commerce site.

You apparently do not like their answers for overall use of Linux on the desktop, so why do you bother with these trivial cases that do not impact on general trends anyway?