Robert Newson wrote:
> Rex Ballard wrote:
>
> ...
> > Sony decided to retaliate against the X-Box, by selling it's PS3 as a
> > Linux machine. When it's released, probably very soon now, we will see
> > millions of little Linux machines, complete with KDE desktops, and
> > maybe even OpenOffice, being sold at K-mart, WalMart, Sears, BestBuy,
> > and any other place that sold the PS/2.
>
> How will this affect the "market share" of Linux? Or will MS [apologists]
> just say it's not the PC market, hence no meaning? But it will be
> interesting in terms of "games machines" - Linux would "hold" a large
> percentage of that market. ^_^
There are Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
Wintrolls can point to actual surveys like Statmarket and state that
Linux is less than 1% of the market.
I can count every single actual deployment of Linux ever done, compared
to the number of Windows machine actually deployed in the market today,
and come up with 55 million it 1999, or 200+ million in 2006, giving
Linux 20% of the market today.
If I really want to get perverse, I could count all of those
depoylements and compare them to this year's sales of PCs, giving Linux
200% of the market.
The one number Microsoft does not want published is the number of NEW
Linux deployments in the last year, compared to the number of NEW
deployments of Windows PCs actually sold in the last year. After all,
if I have 5 VMWare appliances, and 10 million other PC users deployed
Linux on VirtualPC, VMWare, Xen, and Cygwin, and all of these are new
deployments (upgrades, new distributions, new configurations,...), and
you had to deduct one deployment for each machine replaced with a newer
machine (how many were recycled?), then Linux could have 75% or more
of the market by those measures.
The bottom line is that Linux is a growing market and current attempts
to "cash in" are still based on old paradigms. Even though Linux has
some "killer apps", there are still some very limited approaches to
getting a "killer market" that can yield $millions or $billions in
revenue. TiVo was one of those examples of a company that played the
Linux card brilliantly.
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