Bonum Certa Men Certa

Is Net Applications One Order of Magnitude Off Target?

Summary: Another go at a comparison between truth and fiction

SURVEYS that encompass many Web sites cost a lot of money/effort/time to produce and the gain from them is mere unless a particular party gains. It is always very, very important to check where the money comes from. It's valuable to at least understand the business model.



Here at Boycott Novell, 45% of the pages this month are served to "Linux" (that's more than the equivalent figure for "Windows", where "Windows" is just the way it's parsed by AWStats, although there could be HTTP header modification because some people wrestle with stubborn IE-only Web sites).

Moments ago we wrote about the numbers from Net Applications and while we claimed that they were utterly wrong, we wrote nothing about what may be correct.

According to our reader, Chip, Net Applications claimed that GNU/Linux had a market share of 0.3% some years ago (subscription needed). In July of 2007 that's what they are said to have claimed. But wait. This has got to be wrong because it's highly inconsistent w.r.t. other figures we have. From the past couple of weeks we get:

Lies, Damn Lies and Linux Market Share Statistics

"The numbers from NetApplications are clearly unrepresentative of reality," blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider. "Around 2003/4, IDC determined by survey that GNU/Linux was ahead of Mac OS at about 3 percent. Since then GNU/Linux has had growth numbers from 20 to 50 percent in various places.

"That would put GNU/Linux at 7 to 9 percent," he asserted.


There is also this:

usiness model is rebranding Windows executables and selling them to unsuspecting rubes.

A year ago Matt Assay said it was at 2.02%

ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007. http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334 In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%. I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn't have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.

It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest "report" is merely Microsoft's continuing attempt to control the news about Linux's success in replacing Windows on the desktop. It's not working... No one whith half an ounce of brain would take the bait on a "free" Win7 (a dumbed down version that can run only 3 apps at a time) that will deactivate after one year unless the user PAYS Microsoft to activate it. Win7 is NOT free.


As our reader amd-linux (from Germany) put it earlier today:

The thing is that NetApps gets a lot of attention from US/UK IT press, while other observations that show MUCH higher numbers and are equally representative are more or less ignored.

One example is OS stats on heise.de, which is THE mainstream IT new site in Germany. They have now 15% Linux users among their readers, and it would be way more if readers like me were in a situation to use Linux in the office where I read heise.de mostly.

Another example, if you question heise.de being representative is spigel.de which is one of the leading sites of the world (133 in Alexa) and a mainstream news website. Here Linux has around 4%-6%, coming from nearly nothing 2 yrs ago. While spiegel.de is a German news site, is is read from around the world like the BBC site.

It is IMHO safe to assume that Linux worldwide is closer to 2 % than to 1%. The only source who could reliably shed some light on this would be Google, but they refuse to publish any numbers.

But the best, and this nobody can ignore, is the trend. Linux usage is virtually exploding with growth in the double digit percentage area quarter per quarter.


Readers can decide for themselves what the installed base of GNU/Linux really is. We only present some evidence here.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM is "Taking the PIP" (Piss), People 'Retire' 'Voluntarily' to "Focus on Family"
IBM has a billion bucks for 'the butcher', but not a million dollars for critical projects and initiatives in Free software
It Should be Uncontroversial to Say That Social Control Media is a Weapon
Democracy is not compatible with the likes of Kapo-Berg and MElon controlling public discourse of billions
 
FSF Has Grown (More Staff) After a Year of Financial Growth
On October 4 the FSF turns 41
GNU/Linux Has Become More Mainstream in the United Kingdom
It's a long weekend here and we guess some people dabble in GNU/Linux migrations, at least at home
SLAPP Censorship - Part 166 Out of 200: Garrett Wasn't Found Innocent Per Se, the Court Wanted More Evidence of Who Was Behind Particular Accounts Using Tor
It's complicated
Criminals Don't Obey Laws, California Does Not Enhance Online Safety
It has been a while since we last mentioned so-called 'age-verification' laws
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 29, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, August 29, 2026
Links 29/08/2026: Stop the Hate, Goldfish Myths, and xmpp.nz
Links for the day
Links 29/08/2026: Wave of Social Control Media Bans, Suno Data Breach Class Actions
Links for the day
Links 29/08/2026: Microsoft GitHub Outage (Again), "Displaying Ads Directly on Your Monitor", and "Election Deniers Could Soon Control Elections"
Links for the day
Misuse of Bots (Now Sold as "Agents", "Hey Hi", "Automation", and "Efficiency")
They even try to rebrand robotics as "hey hi" and try to sell slop as "work"
Debian: Plagiarism OK, Just be "Responsible" About It
The result isn't the worst, but it's not good either
Don't Let Them Kill Activism
Are the oligarchs shutting the lid on activism and whistleblowers?
SLAPP Censorship - Part 165 Out of 200: Two Years Since My Wife and I Sued
In early September 2024 we hit back
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 28, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, August 28, 2026
Gemini Links 29/08/2026: Death Notice, Systems Biology, and Gopher
Links for the day
Links 28/08/2026: Chatbot Pushers Admit They're Used Heavily for Social Engineering Scams, Strong Backlash Against "Smart Glasses" (CCTV on Legs)
Links for the day
Michael Catanzaro's Latest Blog Post Affirms Rumours of Red Hat Changes and RAs/PIPs at IBM
reading between the lines, IBM is "spitting out" Red Hat staff
If Linux Was Written in Rust, 80% or More of Linux Developers Would Not Understand It (Same If It's Composed by LLM Slop)
The licence (GPL) is not enough when there are ways to bypass it
Gemini Links 28/08/2026: Absurd Tomodachi Summer, Screen Piggery, and Jugulans 1.0.3 Released
Links for the day
Links 28/08/2026: "UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem" and "Growth at All Costs is Cancer"
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 164 Out of 200: Patent Troll SLAPPs, Defamation Trolls, and Stranglers From America
You start to wonder if the core issue is insecurity
Rumours of More PIPs and Layoffs at Confluent Just Months After IBM Bought It
It is meanwhile apparent IBM will have mass layoffs next week (September)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 27, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, August 27, 2026
After Many Waves of PIPs (Silent Layoffs) IBM Makes Non-Silent Layoffs, Effective Next Week (September)
What we heard is turning out to be true