Gartner Group corruption is a subject that we wrote quite a lot about before. It's this time of the year again for Gartner to throw some different types of numbers out of there [1, 2, 3], no matter how they actually get measured. They tend to be measured in a way that satisfies clients of Gartner, but a lot of reporters overlook this fact. Companies like Oracle -- not just Microsoft -- are benefiting from this and Larry Ellison is a major Gartner investor, so this is not too surprising. Bill Gates is also a major Gartner investor and Microsoft a big client.

“The Windows-licenses, of course, are accounted as part of the 'Windows server revenue' and the Linux-installations are of course not.”
      --Rainer WeikusatWe never take Gartner numbers seriously and neither should others. For instance, Gartner counts revenue for servers rather than actual units (and only in large companies), so for reasons that we explained before, those numbers should be ignored. As Rainer Weikusat put it yesterday: "None of 'servers' running 'Linux' I had to deal with since 2003 had any positive impact on 'Linux server revenue' (should be about a dozen), especially since the majority of them are actually repurposed "used" desktop computers originally sold with Windows (which are dead cheap and extremely powerful, thanks to the absurd hardware requirement of 'desktop Windows'). And I suspect that this is a rather typical experience for rather small company using Linux for anything. And the majority of companies are 'rather small', meaning, there will be a large number of such 'below the radar' deployments. Another example would be the company "we" have rented a couple of servers from. As a customer, one can chose between versions of Windows, Ubuntu and CentOS. The Windows-licenses, of course, are accounted as part of the 'Windows server revenue' and the Linux-installations are of course not." ⬆