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Every operating system is fighting to gain users and marketshare, but is becoming “mainstream” a good goal?
While “mainsream” obviously means more users and, thus, usually more revenue for the maker of the OS, it also has some disadvantages. For example, it becomes much harder to break compatibility with older applications in order to move forwards or to change the interface too much. In addition, the OS becomes a much more significant target of viruses.
On the other hand, though, with a lot of users comes a lot of developers writing applications for the OS, and good applications are often some of the most important “features” of an OS.
Ultimately, the answer is “it depends,” since there are both advantages and disadvantages, but marketshare is clearly not always the goal.
Is Linux's Marketshare Closer to 20% Or More?
Recently, I have written some posts about Linux’s marketshare and how to know what it is. Today, I want to entertain a completely different possibility.
I think everyone would agree that there is no definitive way to be able to say for sure what each OS’s marketshare is. It just is not technically possible at this point, as far I know. We do have a lot of evidence, ranging for statistics from the data web browsers report to web pages to people’s general feeling about how many people around them use Linux. Of the information we have, all of it has major flaws that essentially make the results irrelevant. Plus, none of it agrees with any of the other pieces of evidence.
What I want to suggest is that the fact that you cannot prove what the marketshare is, combined with general perceptions that computers are Windows, combined with Microsoft and Apple’s PR all make it perfectly possible that Linux’s marketshare is, in fact, closer to 15% or 30%, making it possibly more than the Mac. After all, a lot seems to suggest that the Mac is weak outside the US and Linux has cought on more outside the US. But hey, that is just a guess too!
The fact is, we have no real evidence and no way of getting real evidence, so, until we get some good evidence, we shouldn’t just assume no one uses Linux.
What do you think? Is it possible we are all underestimating Linux? Have you thought this all along?
Linux's Market Share: Is There Any Way To Know?
One thing many of us would like to know, I am sure, is how many people out there use Linux? The usual numbers, those from Net Applications, would indicate that less than 1% of people use Linux. More recently, though, there have been some more optimistic numbers. Canonical is claiming that 11% of businesses use Ubuntu. (If that is the case, just imagine how many use Red Hat or Suse.) Gartner says that Linux’s market share is 4%, putting it about even with the Mac. And Context says that almost 3% of PCs sold in the UK have Linux pre-installed.
While none of those numbers are huge, they mean the difference between Linux and Mac OS X being about equal and Linux being a speck of dust in the sea. The fundamental problem is that it is really, really hard to know how what the marketshare of Linux, or any open-source software, is. After all, one download might never be used, or only be used for a short time, and another might be used to install Linux onto 100 computers.
In addition to the standard market share numbers I mentioned above, there are at least two others projects trying to determine how many Linux users there are.
The first is the Linux counter. Their idea is to get people to visit the website and register as a Linux user. Obviously, this has some flaws in that anyone can register many times and most people will not bother to register.
The second project is the Open Source Census. The idea is similar, except that you download an application. This presumably gives them better control over double submissions, but it cannot be perfect and it is still voluntary.
Short of every Linux distro calling home, which I hope will never happen, there may never be a way to know how many Linux users there are. Perhaps the downloads of some cross-platform application would give a rough idea, but that application would have to be something that a Linux user, a Mac user, and a Windows user would want equally. If anyone has a better idea, I would love to hear it.