Originally posted by johnc
View Post
Ask yourself this seriously; how would YOU count linux desktop installs, besides breaking everyone's doors down and physically counting?
You can use web browser UA headers, which of course, represent different numbers depending on the services offered by that particular server or group of servers used for the calculations, and is easily and often FAKED. You could use DOWNLOAD counts, which are actually NOT counted (or countable), and a single download could represent many installations. Another way is to use SALES figures, but no, there aren't all that many Linux SALES since its free. How about using your competitions' sales figures? Hmm... how about using your OWN sales figures VS actual product registrations? ---- now we're on to something. How many copies were sold vs how many actually activated? Virtually EVERY SINGLE SALE that isn't "activated" is a check for Linux desktop. I'm sure that they also detect dual-boot situations and can even count the time spent in the various OS's being booted. Those are statistics relatively easy to pick out of the system logs and send off during the next update check.
Of course, the more apt question that you completely missed isn't whether MS is dying on the desktop, but whether the desktop ITSELF is dying. How about comparing the sales figures of ANDROID vs MS in the portable space? Or how about comparing Android portable sales vs MS desktop sales? -- you may find that FAR more Android DEVICES sell than total MS SOFTWARE sales (including so-called "upgrades").
Ask yourself this question: What does the average home user need with a desktop? Its actually a very interesting question because you can actually plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into a phone or tablet, and aside from word processing, the phone or tablet can replace all of the functions that are used by the average home user. Not only that, but it is infinitely simpler for that average home user to obtain and install software for a phone or tablet.
So word processing is now "the" missing (partially) function, which is, of course, an important function, but neither TOTALLY missing, nor irreplaceable. After all, it hardly makes any sense to upgrade your 15 year old desktop computer just for word processing. You also can use online word processing (google drive/docs, steve balmer online, etc.) -- and then, of course, the future DOES hold the promise more complete word processing on phones and tablets; LibreOffice for Android tentatively scheduled for "late 2013", and even msoffice for Android and iflake, which is really interesting since its appearance would actually be an ADMISSION of failure on the part of MS. Source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/36...id-screenshots
windoze dying? Yep. They're sweating bullets. Their mobile platform is a string of total failures, yet the whole world is switching over to mobile. As the desktop dies, they may hold on to a shrinking portion of it as users migrate towards portable computing. The desktop will never completely die though, there will always be power users needing the greater computational power combined with low latency of desktop computers (as opposed to processing on servers with network latency), but these users are, interestingly, more likely to be Linux users than either ms or apple. The desktop will fade away, leaving only the Linux portion of it alive.
Leave a comment: