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____/ bbgruff on Monday 01 September 2008 16:20 : \____
> I don't have a great deal of faith in the figures published by Netcraft, in
> that to my mind they are bound to weigh too heavily the U.S., U.k., and other
> English-speaking nations, while under-representing China, India, Brazil, most
> of Europe, etc. (English-speaking, rather not)
>
> Nevertheless, it does give me some pleasure to look through them each month
> and see what "the trolls own figures" tell us:-
>
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9#
>
> They show in today's figures the Linux
> User Base for August going from 0.82% to 0.93%
>
> To make a change like that, in one month, Linux would need to have a Market
> Share of about *7.5%* for the month.
> (That assumes 20M total units sold, into a user base which was already 1,200M
> units)
>
> The same calculation for Mac would show that to go from 7.76% to 7.87% in one
> month would need it to have a Market Share of about *14.5%* for the month.
>
> Similarly, for MS to go from 91.02% to 90.66% in one month would indicate a
> Market Share of about *69.5%* for the month
>
> That's all on one month's figures, of course - and drawing conclusions from
> one month is very dangerous.
> The interesting thing is that if I do the calculation over 10 months, and
> assume a linear rate of change over the period rather than a step-function 10
> months ago, and with machines being "retired" at the same rate that new
> machines are added, I get a very similar answer. In fact, I then find that
> current Linux Market Share must be just under *6%* .
> (Note that now that Linux is "sold" (pre-installed) it actually makes some
> sense to talk of "Market Share" as well as "% of User base".)
>
> I note that Firefox is also up according to that site - from 19.22% to
> 19.73%. That's a gain for every month of the last 10, except for March/April,
> when it fell by 0.07%, and a rise of 3,76% over the 10 months.
My Gruff, watch what you are linking to.
Is Linux Getting the Shaft?
,----[ Quote ]
| As I recently reported, there is an order of magnitude difference between the
| market share of Linux "out there" in the world, and the market share of LInux
| on Scienceblogs.com and on this very blog. Subsequently, I was trolled by my
| very own brother "... so, when is Luniux going to reach 1% market share?...."
| and this item has come out on ZDNet (which we all know is essentially funded
| by Microsoft, right?): Linux - Still chasing that elusive 1% market share.
|
| [...]
|
| So I went and looked. Here is the description of the database used by the
| Market Share service that everyone seems to rely on:
|
|
| We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive
| on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from
| approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published
| is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website
| statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is
| summarized on a monthly basis.
|
| WTF?
|
| Is this supposed to be some kind of unbiased sample? But wait, there's
| more...
|
| [More jaw-dropping s*ite]
|
|
| [...]
|
| The complexity of this problem is actually rather large. But I can tell you
| one thing: If you were my graduate student and you came to me with this
| sampling strategy, I'd send you back to kindergarten. (If I had that power.)
`----
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/07/is_linux_getting_the_shaft.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
All the PCs in my house and at work run Linux and my site has more Linux users
than Windows users. Therefore, surely Windows is a minority.
Trust me. It's a form of statistics.
It is.
- --
"There's a lot of Linux out there -- much more than Microsoft generally signals
publicly -- and their customers are using it..." --Paul DeGroot, a Directions
On Microsoft analyst.
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