IN OUR PREVIOUS post we showed that the market share of GNU/Linux can easily be misrepresented due to quiet deployments that receive no proper attention because Linux and GNU have no public relations departments with advertisements and such conventional means of mind control.
“It's not reporting, it's opinionated placements in disguise, daemonising one's professional rival.”This is the equivalent of "I like Linux, but..."
It's a lie with which the author tries to gain some credibility to begin with. It was only yesterday (or earlier today, depending on geography) that we wrote about the Microsoft-affiliated "Linux curious" persona attacking more often than before.
"Linux on the desktop: Still not happening," says the former Microsoft TE over at ComputerWorld today. Shame on IDG for publishing this nonsense despite the obvious yet undisclosed conflict of interests. It's either malicious or IDG was bamboozled again (IDG relies on Microsoft as a large revenue stream [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). IDG might as well pass over some writing responsibilities to Microsoft's many PR agencies. It's not reporting, it's opinionated placements in disguise, daemonising one's professional rival.
Last week we wrote about how big statistics firms produce and spread lies that benefit those who pay them [1, 2]. Here is a decent new post which explains the role of money.
Oh Linux, how shall I count thy installs?
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I have also heard it said that 76.3% of people believe that you put a percentage sign behind any random number they will believe it to be true.
Research and marketing companies especially love statistics. That is how they make their money by providing the numbers to make their paying customers feel good. Yet there is the old adage GIGO, which means Garbage In, Garbage Out. It seems to me that just about all of the numbers regarding operating system installs fall into that GIGO category.
Of course bloggers, journalists and article writers take those numbers and spin them into fanciful stories for their readers to eat up like so many cream puffs. These fevered outpourings of fanatical minds are often used to show how their operating system has the most market share and consequently is the bees knees and of course everyone should be using it.
Where do these statistics come from? Most of the time it comes from sales data provided by the companies supplying the operating systems and this is where the problem lies. This is because while companies of proprietary operating systems actually rent their products, open source operating systems are not. So any statistics regarding operating system market share are automatically bogus and can only be used for FUD campaigns.
Operating System on WWWUSE on W3Counter Windows XP 28.00% 53.60% Linux 20.00% 1.55% Windows 7 18.00% 10.66% Windows Vista 16.00% 20.07% Mac OS X 13.00% 8.12% Unknown 3.00% under 1% Windows 2003 1.00% 1.01% iPhone OSX 0.60% 0.75% Android 0.20% 0.10% Windows 2000 0.10% 0.43% All Microsoft 63.10% 85.77% All no Microsoft 36.80% 14.23%
--Steve Ballmer, 2001