An interesting website to visit from time to time is MarketShare. There you can find market share statistics on a number of technologies, such as browsers, operating systems, search platforms, and the like. As a committed Linux user, I’m always interested to note the progress (or lack thereof) of Linux’s market penetration, and visited recently to see if there had been any. The answer, sadly, is not really.
Looking at the graph, there is a slight upward trend, although any gain seen in Q3 2008 seems to have evaporated. Perhaps this is slightly counter-intuitive in light of the collapse of the world’s financial system – you’d think that people without cash would go for the free operating system. Please don’t tell me this is another incarnation of the “flight to quality” we’ve heard so much about. Quality? Microsoft?
Linux stands at less than 1% of total market share, with the Mac accounting for almost 9%, and Windows easily the most popular of all operating systems.
However, an interesting little nugget there is the share held by the iPhone. Bear in mind that this is a phone mostly only accessible in countries with ubiquitous, cheap and fast broadband access, with traditionally low mobile internet access rates, and the 0.37% market share is significant. Are we embarking on a slow but steady trend which will see us primarily surfing using mobile devices? Research seems to indicate that it will be. I wonder if the 2020 estimate is perhaps too conservative – 12 years is an extremely long time in Internet terms.
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December 18th, 2008 at 2:21 am
Yes. Soon enougth the “internet” will be the mobile internet. More the 2 billion people will have theirs first internet experience in their mobile phones and more the one billion will use the internet ONLY in their mobiles.
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