That man is a sheep amongst sheep
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Mac and Linux fail to capitalise on Vista mistakes
IT LOOKS like the Mac OS-X and Linux operating system have failed to do any damage to Microsoft Windows, despite the Vista fiasco.
While the jury is still out on Vista, XP use is shutting Mac OS X and Linux out of the desktop market.
According to Softpedia OSX and Linux use have flatlined in uptake in 2007 although it does not appear immediately obvious if you look at the figures.
Figures from Net Applications showed that Linux doubled its market share over the last year and while this should mean that the world is full of dancing penguins, it isn't. Linux only had 0.37 per cent of the market in the first place and now it has 0.81 per cent. Whoop.
Mac OS X growth did a bit better. Its use grew from 5.67 per cent in December of last year to 6.61 per cent.
Even Vista, with all its faults did better than both of them put together. Windows XP dropped from 85.30 per cent to 79.32 per cent, which is where those punters upgraded/migrated to Vista and not to Mac OS X and Linux.
If your rival is peddling a dull, expensive product with alarming DRM, and a complex licence, with few drivers that work and you can't steal a bit of market share from them you are doing something wrong.
With their collective lack of interest in Linux for the desktop, Open Sauce developers missed a golden window of opportunity to stick it to Microsoft when it was down. Apple at least had an excuse, it was peddling expensive mobile phones at the time and was not really interested in its Mac range. µ
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The MarketShare was determined by what OS people USE, not what they bought.

It was determined from people browsing websites and search engines.

If a person has Linux or a Mac hooked up to a stereo, but browse the net using Vista, it shows a higher marketshare for Vista.

(If a person replaces XP with Vista, Vista marketshare goes down, since he is browsing with XP).

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
The MarketShare was determined by what OS people USE, not what they bought.

It was determined from people browsing websites and search engines.

If a person has Linux or a Mac hooked up to a stereo, but browse the net using Vista, it shows a higher marketshare for Vista.

(If a person replaces XP with Vista, Vista marketshare goes down, since he is browsing with XP).

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
Users experiences will operating systems, at this point will speak for themselves:

Windows breaks

Linux/Unix unites [Penguin a lasting symbol in a cold computing world]

Mac [Roaring Tiger OSX with robust hardware]

Linux is regularly under-reported by sites like w3schools and Net Applications. Both sites are heavily windows-centric (eg. .NET and the others). If 90% of the world's PCs use that other OS, and the sites are heavily into that other OS, they will have a huge bias to that other OS. That they show a growth of Linux is an indication that the growth of Linux is huge. Other, less biased sources indicate world-wide desktop use of GNU/Linux at nearly 6%. Would Dell be selling Linux PCs if only 1 in a 100 sales were going that way? I doubt it.

Get numbers from Google or something with a neutral stance, if you want a fair indication of the presence of operating systems. IDC was showing 3% in 2003, for instance.
See http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P2229

Be sure to look at numbers for the world. USA usage is a fraction of what it is elsewhere. Hotspots are probably Asia and South America. You cannot stagnate if your growth rates are this high:
see http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P2398

I work in education. Schools want IT without spending big bucks. They can get that with GNU/Linux especially with LTSP. Linux is hot and is not stagnating. M$ would not have made the deals with Linux companies this year if that were the case.
Torvalds has worked at Transmeta, but never in any biography is it mentioned that he worked at Microsoft, or for Bill in any capacity.
Blindly spreading rumors is something any fool can do. And touting Bill's "insight" is normally a thing only Forbes or The Economist will do, carefully forgetting that his famed "insight" only kicked in five years after the Internet was banging at his door.
Check out " Vixta.org " Linux just got really interesting.....
The fine article showed the increase in market share for Linux and OS/x, and the market decrease for Windows XP. It then proceeded to say that all of the XP decrease rolled over into Vista increase.

The way i counted it, the XP decrease was about 4%, the OS/x increase was about 1% and the Linux increase was about 1/2 %. Unless there was some other operating system that lost that 1-1/2% market share (OS/2 maybe? -- did it even have 1/2 %?) or there is some way to have a market that is larger than 100%, then according to this article, Vista gained 2-1/2% against Linux 1/2% and OS/x 1%. That works out to a little more than 1/3 of those who are switching actually leaving the MS fold.

As another poster pointed out, it is still harder to get Linux, so it seems to me that the numbers in this article do not support the conclusion that the author came to.
"Every conceivable application concept is available in Linux and many times over at that. "

Loaded Photoshop on Linux lately? Oh wait, the only way to do that is to fool Photoshop into thinking it's running on Windows via Wine. Such an elegant solution (not) for a supposedly superiour kernel.
Is this the same thing as getting something done by Committee?

I mean we all know what happens when you really want something NOT to happen...

regards
that you never used to work at "The Register"?

However, it's too early to write off Linux on the desktop yet; come Ubuntu's pre-installed compiz-fusion, I'll be installing it on more of the works' laptops...
Don't forget the large number of people buying machines bundled with Vista, which they immediately replace with an XP installation. That's two Dimdows licences counted, for a sale of only one machine. Which would be inflating Microsoft's market share figures.
Excuse the pun in the subject, but that's exactly what you're doing. A week ago, I stepped inside a Photo-Hall shop where I live, and there are certainly 20 pc's there setup and working, ALL of them without exception running Vista Home Premium.
Is that any sort of competition we have in this market? Come on. You make it sound like there would actually be a choice for the consumer... It reminds me a bit of geese being forcefed grain to grow oversized livers. They haven't got much of a choice either
My first question would be -- was this article written by a Journalism major? Clearly this person lacks the understanding between Open Source product and commercial offerings. 

Linux per se does not have some monolith attempting to maintain market share. So if it gains anything it is because the end user selected it instead of having the OS shoved down their throat. 

As for the Mac, Apple has always seen comfortable with < 10% share. Fact I don't think would know how to handle being at 51% of market.
Or it was that he got offered a job at Microsoft,uh? Well, the point is that Linus Torvalds was Bill Gates trojan horse in the industry to ensure that OS/2 would have failed on the desktop, that the majority of people wouldn't have paid for any competing OS product thanks to the GNU/OpenSource myth of everything free of charge, and finally thanks to the chaos created by Linux in the IT world the high revenue that high-end commercial UNIXes offered in the past to Microsoft competitors would have been no more. 
In the end, Linux it's all about speculation, many Companies went bankrupt or approached failure thanks to it and that was Bill Gates main goal, to ensure that NT had a chance in the serve market where it kept gaining market share. It all happened thanks to Linux and Torvalds. 
Yeah, sure, Mr.Gates is so naive that he would never ever have planned something like this.. yep, of course... but yeah, sure.. really.. not?!
A fairly unrealistic article.

Most consumers have to go well out of their way not to get Windows pre-installed, and then end up paying for the benefit.

I have recently bought a Lenova laptop which came with XP, but I immediatly installed Ubuntu on it (dual boot).

It was easier and cheaper to get the hardware I wanted and add Linux than it was to order something with only Linux on it for a marginal cost saving with no choice of hardware.

Get games running on the Penguin, without setup/install processes that involve crossing fingers and sacrificing chickens, and I'm there.
Who does the estimates of market share. World-wide it is estimated that Ubuntu has 20 million installs. Mac OS is estimated to have 20 million users. I believe in the first week Fedora 6 had a million downloads. If you extrapolate out the number of Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions you can easily come to 50-100 million installs.

So, why would 50 to 100 million users only be .3 of a percent of the market share?

And, to double in a year is significant, especially for an OS with such a difficult zealotrous history.

90% of all users could use Linux and be happy. IT does what 90% of all users want. That includes sharing data with apps in other operating systems. Every conceivable application concept is available in Linux and many times over at that. 

The process of updating and bug fixing is much greater/faster than what you would find with the proprietard-type software.

Let's not demean the accomplishments, even against XP & Vista because such a huge gain is nothing to look down upon.
u think people are actually purchasing that crap at a retail store?

further more, why would linux distros even try to steal market share? it's there for those who want it.... it's not like they are trying to own our souls and control our life...same goes for apple.
No doubt that XP has software & Hardware to make best system for 16 bit core intense games. However, penguie is close in many respects, except one, it dosn't offer fun extras of XP. easy media.

Come On Little Bird Mamel, Ad some already done media into your existing disc & people will buy it for back up or to put into older machines, for FREE.

Thrift Stores probably eat it like Diamond Brouches in collection dump.(that poor bird).
However, Nothing Takes Beating & Keeps On Ticking like ULTIMATE. When Hardware can handle NT6 32 Bit core, well 64 bit o/s will run even better than 32, I am sure of That.

That only means that less than 10% knows what they buy