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Net Applications Finally Shows It's Just a Joke: Mac ‘Market Share’ Halved Overnight!

Summary: Net Applications changes its mind about so-called 'statistics'

WE HAVE been writing extensively about how Net Applications, contrary to Steve Ballmer, places Apple ahead of GNU/Linux in terms of market share. But Apple is virtually out of existence in the large majority of the world's countries and it has been known for many years that GNU/Linux had gained a lot on the desktop, globally speaking.



For those who do not yet know about Net Applications admitting the deficiency of their US-oriented 'results' (and tweaking of them too), not to mention having Microsoft as a paying client and having staff with Microsoft history, read the following:



From the Fortune/CNN Web site comes the following rant which shows just how 'reliable' Net Applications must be now that Apple sees a rise in performance, whereas Microsoft reports a sharp decline.

Net Applications: Apple just lost half its ‘market share'



The so-called market share reports issued every month by Net Applications have long been controversial — mostly because they didn’t actually measure market share (which business people typically express as the number of widgets they sell in a given period divided by the total number of widgets sold).

What Net Applications did instead was sample data from browsers visiting their clients’ websites and report what percentage came from machines running Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.


If almost 10% can become 5% overnight (based on some secret recipe), how reliable can those numbers be? Since Net Applications refuses to show its methods and its data, its results are as useless as those that arrive from Black Duck.

“Just having a lot of IP addresses means nothing; it is the distribution and the population of IPs that count...”It is funny how Net Applications always raves about number of IP addresses. Just having a lot of IP addresses means nothing; it is the distribution and the population of IPs that count (here is a great example of it). Net Applications keeps its data secret, obviously, so it usually means it has something to hide, something to be embarrassed of, like Diebold. It is biased in favour parts of the world where GNU/Linux adoption is already known to be very scarce, notably the United States.

Speaking of GNU/Linux adoption, not many people are even aware of the fact that, according to the following new report, "all of the members of the European Union (EU) are required to use open source Linux-based software exclusively, and this includes everything from operating systems to office applications." Here is a broader quote:

When I thought about it, the list of open source software applications is actually quite long. Some of the major open source applications you may have heard about include MySQL, Apache Server, Wordpress, Mozilla Firefox, Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, just to name a few.

I found it interesting to hear that all of the members of the European Union (EU) are required to use open source Linux-based software exclusively, and this includes everything from operating systems to office applications. There is also a move afoot here in this country to attempt to do a similar thing. A couple of the major programs are Government 2.0, that hopes to leverage Web 2.0 federated social networks in government, and Open Source for America, that advocates greater acceptance of open source software and efforts.

[...]

Open source Linux actually fostered the emergence of a couple of computer categories – the netbook, including the one laptop per child (OLPC) program where a good percentage are sold with Linux as the operating system.


What is the market share of GNU/Linux on the desktop? According to statistics from the Boycott Novell domain, it is approximately 40%. Honest.

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