Star Windows 7 Hits 3% Market Share, Approaches 4%
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 2nd Nov 2009 23:59 UTC
Windows Windows 7 has been out and about for little over a week now, and as it turns out, Microsoft's new baby is doing relatively well. That is, according to the figures by NetApplications: Windows 7 already reached the 3% mark this weekend, and is already closing in on the 4% mark.
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RE[17]: Windows market share
by lemur2 on Thu 5th Nov 2009 09:58 UTC in reply to "RE[16]: Windows market share"
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

"MSI claimed the return rate was high, but when MSI put Linux on their machines they used a poor implementation of SuSe with a dodgy wireless driver.


And this is somehow supposed to be a selling point for Linux-based netbooks? "

No, it is a comment on the stupidity of some OEMs. When MSI designed their U90 netbook, the only OS that it would run was Linux (as XP was being withdrawn). Yet they designed in a wireless chip that had only an experimental Linux driver, even though there were plenty of other wireless chips they could have used without a problem.

How stupid was that? THEN they complained that people were returning their MSI netbooks because of flaky wireless! Der!

"Ask Dell (who used Ubuntu). The return rate for Linux was the same as the return rate for Windows, and it was very low.


Let's put this in terms you can understand. By your own admission, Dell sells Windows on about 70% of all netbooks today. That's over twice the number of Linux netbooks sold. [Personally, I think the percentage of Windows-based netbooks in the broader market is probably closer to 95%. But I digress.] "

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140343/Linux_s_share_of_net...
Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.


68%, but we digress.

Here's what Dell says: "The number of Linux returns are approximately the same as those for Windows netbooks." Read that line carefully. He didn't say the return percentage. He said "the number of returns." What that means (to the mathematically challenged) is that more than twice as many Linux netbooks are being returned as Windows netbooks. Wow. That must burn. Kind of like a vampire getting hit with holy water.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/dell_reality_linux_windows_...
we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux. We've been quite pleased with the stability and technical soundness of the Linux machines.


Dell said "return rate".

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/13/dell-refutes-high-linux-netbook-...

Dell's Senior Product Marketing Manager Todd Finch is refuting that last claim, saying "we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux."


Yep. "return rate" is what Dell's Finch said.

As I mentioned earlier, MS is forbidden by consent decree from preventing OEMs from choosing alternate platforms.


Being forbidden doesn't stop Microsoft from doing it, however.

And if, as you claim, Linux is as good as you think it is, there's no reason why Linux can't run on any MS-spec'd hardware.


Oh, it can. MS-spec'd hardware is actually an overkill for Linux. It actually pushes the price of netbooks up higher than it needs to be.

"Microsoft's problems here are many ... making it inexpensive removes headroom for Microsoft to charge for their OS. Microsoft don't have a wear-levelling filesystem.


Again, so what. Microsoft's hardware spec doesn't preclude Linux from competing. It either works -- or it doesn't. If you don't think it works, then take your ball and go home. Otherwise, stop blaming MS for failure of Linux to own the netbook market. "

It makes the price higher than it needs to be. That is bad for consumers.

Oh, and it makes the performance way worse. If an SSD was just flash memory with a direct block I/O to a CPU bus, with the wear-levelling built into the filesystem, then it would be far faster than a hard disk.

Instead, to accommodate Microsoft OSes lack of a wear-levelling filesystem, SSDs are built with a microcontroller to do the wear-levelling, which slows it all own.

BTW ... 32% of the worldwide market this year for Linux is hardly a failure. Now if it were only possible to somehow get through to those like you who will not listen, it would become possible to save you too a great deal of expense for your computing.

Edited 2009-11-05 10:10 UTC

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