European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft's software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows. During the past few years, Europe's elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway. Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.
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Member since:2005-07-02
"Caching distorts raw data; audiences vary for each site; methodologies vary for each survey; surveys miss or omit important details; surveys mis-identify browsers or other user agents; small sample sizes exaggerate fluctuations; and stats don’t count those who stay away because their browsers are not supported."
http://upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
"4. What you can't know.
[...]
ii. You can't tell how many visitors you've had. You can guess by looking at the number of distinct hosts that have requested things from you. Indeed this is what many programs mean when they report "visitors". But this is not always a good estimate for three reasons. First, if users get your pages from a local cache server, you will never know about it. Secondly, sometimes many users appear to connect from the same host: either users from the same company or ISP, or users using the same cache server. Finally, sometimes one user appears to connect from many different hosts. AOL now allocates users a different hostname for every request. So if your home page has 10 graphics on, and an AOL user visits it, most programs will count that as 11 different visitors!"
http://www.analog.cx/docs/webworks.html
“Statistics are no substitute for judgment” — Henry Clay
“Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance” — Morris Klein
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please: facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable” — Mark Twain
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If only because of caching, it's clear that web stats are not useful to determing OS market share. Note how OneStat calls it "usage share", and not "market share."
No one believes you here, NotParker. You were a troll on Digg, and you eventually left that site when you constantly got digged down. Same thing's going to happen here. (Fortunately, there are no threads about Global Warming, because then you could all show us you are a GW Denier in addition to a Microsoft cheerleader...)
Member since:2006-06-01
small sample sizes exaggerate fluctuations; and stats don’t count those who stay away because their browsers are not supported.
Please corroborate your claim that OneStat's users are a "small sample size" and which unsupported browsers do you think are not counted.
You've posted that quote 100 times and it still seems downright silly to claim 3 huge web analytics firms month after month are a "small sample size"
1) 20,000 visitors in each of 100 countries is NOT a small sample size.
It is actually a very large sample size.
2) Onestats numbers are corroborated by other large web analytics firms sugch as TheCounter and NetApplications.
And calling someone a troll because they have stats from 2006 and not estimates from January of 2005 is awfully sad.
Edited 2006-12-12 05:57
Member since:
2006-06-01
"OneStat.com is the number one provider of real-time web site analytics in the world. Our superior technology powers more than 75,000 websites in 100 countries. "
My point exactly. Nowhere do they claim that their stats will provide accurate market share numbers for OSes.
"Methodology: A global usage share of xx percent for OS Y means that xx percent of the visitors of Internet users arrived at sites that are using one of OneStat.com's services by using the particular number of OS Y. All numbers mentioned in the research are averages and all measurements are normalised to the GMT timezone. Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day."
I think web analytics is the only method capable of determining which operating systems and browsers are surfing the web.
Either there are very few Linux users or Linux users are not using their PC's to surf the web.