Shuttleworth Closes Bug #1, Microsoft's Market Share

Written by Michael Larabel in Microsoft on 30 May 2013 at 08:55 AM EDT. 78 Comments
MICROSOFT
Interestingly, this morning Mark Shuttleworth decided to close Ubuntu's Bug #1 on Launchpad, the bug report created by him in 2004 about Microsoft having a majority market-share. He feels that the Windows creator is no longer commanding the market, but neither is Ubuntu.

Over a thousand responses came to that bug report and it being cited many times since 2004, which came down to "Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug which Ubuntu and other projects are meant to fix."

While Microsoft is still controlling the PC market in terms of new PC shipments and still globally Windows being more widely used on desktops than Linux or other operating systems, Mark now feels okay with closing the report. The reasons he expressed in his closing message for the bug report in changing the status to "fix released" include:

- The personal computing market is now more broad than it was in 2004 with phones, tablets, and wearable computing now being out there.

- The broader market is more competitive with Apple iOS and Google Android.

- While Android isn't Mark's favorite choice of Linux, he admits that the open-source platform provides practical and economic benefits to users and the industry.

- A shift has taken place in the industry over the past nine years and Ubuntu has played a role in this change.

- For cloud computing with Microsoft IAAS, they are focused on supporting all operating systems -- Linux guests included -- rather than just Windows.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week