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Our Blogs The BeerFiles The extremely vocal desktop Linux tinority
Our Blogs The BeerFiles The extremely vocal desktop Linux tinority | The extremely vocal desktop Linux tinority |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Monday, 17 November 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 Let's start with the premise that there are about 1.4
billion Internet users (and effectively hence computer users)
worldwide. Featured Whitepaper
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To be fair, you can also look at Wikipedia which provides a range of stats from different sources. Even the most optimistic of estimates gives Linux at most 2% market share, while some sources go as low as 0.4%. Lets assume the best case scenario of 2% Linux market share of about 28 million. Microsoft probably sells more Windows licenses than that every three months. There's no doubt that the Linux desktop cause has been helped to a certain degree by the emergence of cheap netbooks like the Asus Eee PC. However, Asus cottoned on very quickly to the fact that they would sell a hell of a lot more of their popular new product range if they quickly brought Windows versions to market - and they were right! Every six months or so the great white hope of the desktop Linux tinority, Ubuntu, releases a new version to market. We're up to Ubuntu 8.10 (2008, October). There's no doubt, that the look and feel and hardware compatibility is improving. However, I still can't run most of the applications I want on it. A few days ago, Google released a beta of its new video chat service. Guess what? It doesn't run on Linux. When I'm away I need to use my Telstra 3G wireless data card on my netbook. Guess what? It doesn't run on Linux. However, the Linux tinority will jump up and down and yell that there's a multitude of wonderful open source applications sitting right there in the software repository that will do every single job that I want to get done. Maybe, but I still can't run MS Office, access an advanced version of Skype, connect up my 3G data card, run iTunes or get to have a look at Google Video Chat. Then of course there is the issue of usability. CONTINUED Page 4 |
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