Thursday, September 30, 2010

The good news? The Linux market share quadrupled between 2004 and 2010

Mind Booster Noori is a dedicated person. M.B.N. went through a ton of revisions of a particular Wikipedia page, compiled them, and posted the evolution of operating system usage on a quarter-by-quarter/month-by-month basis between late 2004 and August 2010.

I'm not going to steal M.B.N.'s thunder by copying the table - you can see it here - but this example goes to show that statistics can be spun in any fashion.

One way to look at the numbers is to note that the market share of Linux has quadrupled over the period - something that Linux fanbois would consider a rousing success.

Not that the Apple fanbois have anything to complain about - Apple market share doubled.

And because of these dramatic changes in the operating system landscape, the market share of Windows operating systems declined.

All the way down to 88.92%.

All that means is that it's just a little bit harder to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. But the difference between 88.92% and 96.34%, while of some concern, isn't of paramount importance to a Harvard dropout.
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