A recent study released by Net
Applications indicates that the market share of Windows among
Internet-connected devices could drop below 90% as soon as the fourth
quarter of this year. This seems to be the same report referred to earlier that showed Linux approaching a 1% use
share.
Sure, my router uses Linux. I tried installing Mac OSX on the little linksys guy, but the DVD wouldn’t fit.
If I recall correctly, the airport uses Darwin the open source portion of OS X, though my router is a Buffalo with Linux. (Before the patent lawsuit that made Buffalo withdraw their wifi routers from the US market. ) I like Linux on routers, but I don’t think that’s the topic they’re discussing.
We must hope this doesn’t go much further. Its tempting to think of OSX and Windows as Pepsi and Coke – a change of share between two essentially similar concoctions which makes very little difference to the non cola drinkers. In some ways this is true, as far as the OSs themselves are concerned, but the company business models are very different, and that matters a lot.
A world in which Apple has 90% share would be a lot different, and a lot worse for society, than the present one with 90% share for MS. At least with MS, the hardware is open. The world of 90% share for Apple would be overpriced, DRM choked and locked in, and plagued by repeated bouts of planned obsolescence. Hardware innovation would be stifled along with competition.
Those of us who are committed to open source software because of the implications for society, open access to information and intellectual freedom do have a horse in this race, and its not the one you might expect.
Edited 2008-07-08 07:31 UTC
Pure FUD. In what way is OS X more “DRM chocked” than MS? iTunes offers optional DRM, yes, so does Windows Media Player, and in fact Windows Media Player and Vista’s DRM is much more onerous than anything in OS X, as Vista also implements DRM designed to “plug the analog hole”. The OS itself is not “DRM chocked”, nor is the platform a “locked in” closed platform the way say an Xbox or PS3 is. Anyone can write software for it, including open source software, and they do – in fact many Unix open source programs you may be familiar with run on OS X. In fact, the core of OS X, “Darwin”, is open source Unix, and in fact is based on an open-source codebase that predates Linux. (NeXTStep) The GUI, admittedly, is not, but aren’t you comparing it to Windows which is entirely closed-source?
As for “planned obsolecense”, most of the time even when they change CPU architecture or the entire OS structure they’ve made a migration path, in both cases (from PPC and OS9 and going back to the 68K migration) one that’s lasted years. Now, Microsoft Windows has ran on the same chip, the intel 80×86 series, for a long time, but that’s not “more open”, that’s simply more locked-into Intel’s monopoly. Of course, due to that economy of scale, which has produced as of late better chips than the PPC, Apple switched to intel (which I don’t regret, again, now it’s the better chip).
Apple is often criticised for being slower to introduce new technology by commentators, Jobs prefers a longer product cycle than intel has pressed on them, they’ve improved in this, now they even occasionally use CPUs that Intel introduced for the Air and the 3.04GHz iMac that were available on it first, but I find it quite puzzling that now they’re being accused by the peanut gallery for “planned obsolescence”. Maybe they see Snow Leopard, which includes multicore intel specific optimizations and possible phasing out of PPC support, and assume it’s been that way throughout Apple’s history and they intend to continue doing this. People who accuse Apple of DRM lock-in and planned obsolescence know nothing of Apple other than iPods and Snow Leopard.
OS X has more open source components by far than Windows, which is entirely a closed source system. Apple gives back to the community, now, maybe not as much as a purely open-source OS company would (which one do you have in mind?), but they do have some presence in the open source community, while Microsoft has practically none. Weren’t the latest Ruby security updates, for example, Apple contributed? When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that? Apple doesn’t view Open Source as a “cancer”, on the contrary, they bet part of their business on it. I think the open source community has nothing to worry about if OS X gains some market share at the expense of Windows. I find this sort of criticism of Apple as being more evil than Microsoft (assuming one can attribute any morals, sadly, to a public corporation) to be a bit short-sighted at best.
Apple and Microsoft have both contributed a lot towards the innovation that have made it possible for all people to be able to handle computers. I suspect if it weren’t for companies like Apple, with the Apple II, IBM would have never come out with the PC, or the Macintosh concerning Microsoft Windows. Now, it’s good that the PC has clones, but let’s not get carried away about the more open hardware of the PC and the future of open source software; which aren’t related items.
(Besides, if you want to run open-source hardware A PC is not it. That’s open-source hardware projects like “open cores”. Though Sun has made some of it’s CPU line open source now.)
One of the components that is used on many Linux distros that Apple contribute a lot to is CUPS.
IMHO, this has come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years.
Slightly Off Topic, the way,
why is it that the SMB implementation in OS/X finds windows shares better than any Windows system does?
There’s a good reason for that…Apple owns CUPS. It was initially developed by Easy Software Products but is now owned and maintained by Apple Inc. to promote a standard printing solution for *NIX systems. It is the standard printing system in Mac OS X and most Linux distributions alike.
So would you rather they bought it and then closed it off?
Credit where credit is due.
It might not be SMB, you may be talking about the fact that OS X caches Windows shares. It’s better at Windows networking than Windows, in my experience. Of course, as a server otherwise, it leaves a lot to be desired – BSD, Solaris, or Linux are better servers than OS X.
Vista finds them about as well (I used to ask the same thing during the xp years)
“We must hope this doesn’t go much further. Its tempting to think of OSX and Windows as Pepsi and Coke – a change of share between two essentially similar concoctions which makes very little difference to the non cola drinkers. In some ways this is true, as far as the OSs themselves are concerned, but the company business models are very different, and that matters a lot.”
It’s not we, it’s you who hope that this doesn’t go further.
I hope Windows market share goes down as hell. At this point I don’t mind if MacOS goes up. Maybe it would be worse with Mac having 90% of the market share. But better than both situations would be Linux or FreeBSD having 90% of the market share. That would definitely be a better world. The best world.
If Mac and Windows a Pepsi and Coke, Linux is fresh squeezed orange juice (I mean custom made).
I can pull out numbers like that from my hat (or from somewhere else that is part of my body)
The questions are: Who paid for the study?
Which sites were selected as ‘representative for the overall market’? How do they count the OS users? Are they using browser agent-string and if so how many agent-string do they know? How many of them don’t they know and get discarded in the result? Do they filter duplicate IP/user? How?
Those numbers mean nothing to me as they are not explained. It’s all opaque like if the light was switched off and they told you to go that direction as if they saw something, but they don’t want to tell you what.
Probably Net Applications. They aren’t a survey company.
About 40,000 websites that Net Applications are involved with. I’m not sure how unbiased the sample is either, but their statistics do fit in with the doubled share of Apple computers over the past two years, reflected in sales figures given to stockholders. (Which if you fake them, you’re in for a stockholder lawsuit. Steve Jobs already has his hands full with one of those, he doesn’t need another.) The increase in Linux share also is reflected in real-world data. The EEE PC, 40% of which are running Linux, is one of the hottest selling laptops now worldwide, while distributions like Ubuntu have a reputation for ease of use that Linux previously did not have.
That’s irrelevant, as all browser agent strings also include the OS the browser is being run under. This is easily parsed. I doubt that the amount of non-firefox, non-safari (they have iPhone stats, so they’re counting it), and non-IE browsers, are not statistically significant for the purposes of this survey; assuming they’re doing any “discarding” at all, because it would be fairly easy to parse what OS is being run in a browser-independant way if you’re familiar with browser agent strings. (Most have the “Mozilla” type string that dates back to Netscape Navigator, even IE or Safari which spoof it.)
Probably not many, know of many Windows Opera users? Enough to throw things off double-digit percentage-wise? (Again, Opera is a decent browser, but we’re talking about OS statistics and I don’t really think Windows Opera users are a significant factor, the only real factor that would affect it since it’s the only one that didn’t use the Mozilla string.)
That’s a good question, but do you know of any 40,000 website conspiracy of Linux and Macintosh computers, set up in a botnet, to throw off a survey of hundreds of thousands of visitors? I didn’t think so.
It probably doesn’t make a big difference for the share or Windows and OS/X (89% is close to 91%).
Only for linux, the 1% share does not seem realistic to me. Maybe in the US (they didn’t even tell the language break down of their selected sites). I know many linux browsers fake Windows user agent string. Anyway, above all, I don’t trust their selection of web sites. I bet they only selected english web sites or worse US sites. Where I live, linux online share is closer to 15% than 1% in my unbased opinion, but I don’t pretend to know anything and certainly don’t publish numbers without explaning where they come from in an open manner. The bottom line is that those statistics are worthless to me. A complete specification would add value to it.
Edited 2008-07-08 11:42 UTC
It always surprises me when I see low Linux statistics, especially as low as less than 1%. Maybe there are lots of Linux users, but they spend all their browsing time at OS news sites so they don’t show up on the statistics.
I love how this is posted with a “wow, Linux has nearly 1%!” spin when the article states that Mac OS X is gaining at the expense of Windows. Best selling UNIX variant ever, and there’s a reason for that, folks. It works for (almost) everyone (obviously not including the folks who want to hax0r their own kernels, but they’re a pretty small minority).
Linux would suck up more of the Windows share if the usability issues (and that includes the issues with the community) could be smoothed over.
There is no more usability issue with linux than there is with kernel32.dll or BSD. The issue is in your head. If you are not a developer, you don’t have to deal with either linux or kernel32.dll or BSD. On the other hand, I don’t see many people complaining about their eeePC not being usable, or their router or their phone or their pre-installed PC. Those complaning that linux is not usable are those who are not developer but still want to patch their kernel with custom made crap. And even doing that is far far far more easy than patching kernel32.dll. Only that MS hides the complexity by not publishing any information anywhere on how you do it doesn’t mean it is easy. I suspect thet their code is as complex and as unusable, if not much more than linux.
Edited 2008-07-08 13:54 UTC
Apple is a f–king company with a f–king giant budget on its back. Goddammit, why the hell are people so slow to notice this?
People have never bought the better product. They never have, and it’s hard to imagine a future where they will.
Do we really need three versions of the same story? The first one was the “Mac share increases by 32% (since one year ago)” story, the next was “Linux chasing elusive 1%” story, and now this “Windows could fall below 90%” story, all using the exact same stats: The June 2008 web usage stats provided by marketshare.hitslink.com. These are all the exact same story.
Can we move on, already?
But if we must dwell on this, here’s one more take on these same stats:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/147966/new_survey_vista_cleans_mac_o…
New Survey: Vista Cleans Mac OSX’s Clock
This story talks about how the same stats show that during the same period that Mac increased by 32%, Vista increased by 355%.
I’m sure another story will popup about how these stats show huge growth in iPhone web browsing (from 0% a year ago to 0.16% today), etc, etc.
Back to this story, the Windows stats will fall below 90% by the end of the year, without question.
But the most fascinating thing is that Linux has been getting orders of magnitude more press coverage than it deserves. Why is it that the the tech media has, over the last ten years, given an OS at less than 1% share more coverage than either Windows or Mac (each of which has orders of magnitude larger share)? It’s almost like the entire tech media collectively decided to shove Linux down a resistant public’s throat. I can’t think of *any* other 1% share product that gets such extensive coverage over such a long period of time.