Re: tlug: Fwd: Edupage, 29 October 1998

[Jonathan Byrne - 3Web <jq@example.com>]

Last day before the list split, so I gotta write on this non-technical topic
:-)

On Sat, 31 Oct 1998, Maynard Hogg wrote:

>A recent Dataquest survey shows that Unix growth is accelerating and
>outpacing that of its main competitor, Windows NT.  Unix market share has
>grown from 36% in 1996 to 42.7% in the second quarter of this year.  The NT
>market has increased from 9.7% to 16.2% during the same time period.  "NT is

While the claim that "Unix growth is acceleratng and outpacing . . . NT" may
be true (or not), we can't determine that from the numbers given here.  First,
it's just a single snapshot of Unix market share growth and NT market share
growth.  To determine whether or not either of these was accelerating, we
would need to see some comparisons with their market share increases at other
times.

I also wonder exactly what they mean by "outpacing."  Sure, Unix has a larger
market share.  But according to the numbers above, Unix experienced a roughly
20% increase in market share at the same time that NT experienced a roughly
60% increase in market share.  It seems there is definitely some outpacing
going on there, but NT is doing it.  Most of the market share for both, but
especially for NT, has probably come at the expense of Netware.  If we
examined only the enterprise-level server market, we might see a much better
showing for Unix.

What would really be interesting would be a comparison between NT Server
market share growth and the growth of Linux in the server market.

Jonathan

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