Linux desktop market penetration: about 1 and halfpercent 3395

Nobody really knows. The 0.1 percent was once given based on a very faulty survey done using a very unreliable method, and was only published as an "example" and was for data from something like 1998.

The most reliable survey method is to count browsers against cookies buttigned by a major site. Google now has "personalized" service such as gmail, and this could provide a more accurate set of numbers.

But even this wouldn't count the dual-boot machines, the servers, the appliances, the TIVO boxes, the cell phones, the televisions, the routers, the virtual machines, the LiveCD, and the routers, WiFi hub, and the other "hidden" machines that are not used as web browsers, or the masquerading systems.

Microsoft has twice testified in courd, once before the DOJ and once before the EU, that Linux made up between 14% and 17% of the market. This was probably based on year-to-year unit volumes and was probably measured using some of the techniques I described above such as cookie counters for MSN, MSNBC, and other Microsoft "partner" sites. IDC has also estimated Linux at roughly 17% - for that same period - remember that Microsoft was giving that testimony in 1999 and 2000.

Google's Zeitgeist showed the numbers identifying themselves as Linux at roughly 1% but detailed examination of other HTLOG records for that period indicated that most browsers, being written to be compiled for ANY platform supporting the GCC compiler, was often reporting itself as "Unix" or just "X11". There were no contracts requiring these browsers to identify the operating system in exchange for access to copyrighted materials protected by nondisclosure agreements. Furthermore, many Linux systems had a page caching and queuing system called "squid" which again appeared to be a generic system - and didn't even identify itself as X11.

Current estimates from Red Hat seem to indicate that Linux is somewhere between 40 million and 50 million deployments. This is based on Red Hat's buttumption that it is the largest percentage of the market by revenue and an buttumption that revenue relates to deployments.

Notice that I don't refere to shipments, licenses, or registrations, but rather to deployments. After all, there are nearly 100 distributions, and often one deployment is replaced by another, but it's still one deployment. At the same time, many PCs have several depolyments on a single PC. Some PCs have as many as 200 gigabytes in their hard drive, and each Linux distribution typically takes 5-10 gigabytes. This would allow for as many as 100 deployments on a single PC. These could be different boot images available to a boot manager, or different VMs that could be started using a "player". If a user were to flip between these implementations, they would be counted as active deployments. In effect, it's as if there were several PCs each with a copy of Linux running in it, just not all at the same time.

There may have been as many as 100 million total deployments, and growing at somewhere between 40 and 50 million new deployments in 2005.

The advent of VM Player could easily double or even quatruple that number, meaning that we could see as many as 200 million new deployements of Linux in 2006.

This by no means implies that Microsoft is out of the picture either. In fact, this may even mean new markets for Microsoft, and new ways of accessing markets, but it does mean that Microsoft will lose it's monopoly control over the market. More importantly, Microsoft will lose it's monopoly control over the world's information.