Does Linux suck or is it lusers who suck?

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 08 October 2008 06:37

Opinion and Analysis

Statistics can hide a great deal of information. Especially the actual state of play in the consumer market.
That's why, until we have actual numbers tagged on to the story of the return of the MSI Wind netbook, it is premature to leap to conclusions .

Briefly, an official of MSI last week said that the return rate of MSI's netbooks running GNU/Linux (in this case a modified version of Novell's SUSE) was four times that of the same hardware running (or crawling with) Windows.

The official, Andy Tung, provided no figures. But anybody who knows high-school arithmetic can work out that if the sales of the GNU/Linux netbooks were four times the number of XP netbooks, then that would mean the sales for both types are equal.

If GNU/Linux netbooks were outselling Windows netbooks at a ratio greater than 4:1 then that means that they are outselling Windows netbooks despite the rate of returns.

Why do we have no figures of the sales of each kind of netbook provided by Tung? He gives total sales as ranging between 150,000 and 250,000 - a pretty big variance which itself makes me inclined to be somewhat suspicious.

It's something like the daily polls provided by Fox News where they tell you that 76 percent voted yes to some question or the other and 24 percent said no. How many people voted? Ah, that vital figure is never provided.