| gabriel rosenkoetter on 26 Feb 2004 19:46:02 -0000 |
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On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 01:29:33PM -0500, Paul wrote: > I just said that I was told. This is my only reference: > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/13/2134234&mode=thread The only portion of that that's not slashdork BS (and, therefore, irrelevant) is the bit that relies directly on the article: prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is optimistic about desktop Linux's future, telling a story of Capital Cardiology Associates, whose 160 employees migrated to Linux desktops. Furthermore, Business Week expects IDC to announce desktop Linux installations to reach 3.2%, for the first time overtaking Macintosh market share. By 2007, IDC forecasts, Linux will be installed on 6% of the desktops. It's also worth mentioning that desktop Linux market share for 2002 was 2.8% and that year it was behind Apple's operating system." It's important to read propaganda like this very carefully. The suggestion seems to be that IDC will announce (or, announced? did it ever?) that desktop Linux INSTALLATIONS had reached 3.2% of the "market share". This is a woefully misleading metric: it just means that there were more newly-installed Linux systems than there were newly-installed Mac OS systems. Suggesting that there are now more Linux desktop users than Mac desktop users because of this is a logical fallacy. There are still Mac OS users using the same Macintosh that they bought in the mid-90s. The hardware is still functioning just fine, it's not necessary to upgrade the operating system to avoid catastrophic security problems, and the hardware doesn't need to be upgraded unless it breaks or a new the OS needs more power (as they always do), so why change? This statement simply cannot be made about any operating system running on IA32 hardware. The statement that there exists IA32 hardware of equal caliber to Apple (and Sun, but that's a separate argument) hardware is true. And that hardware has almost exactly the same market share of home users that Apple hardware does. Because it's just as expensive. -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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