Four years ago Charlie Demerjean wrote this at The Inquirer.
In light of the won’t do and can’t do, Microsoft sits there, and watches its market share begin to erode. That’s happening slowly at first, but the snowball is rolling. A few people are starting to look up the hill and notice this big thing barreling down at them, and some are bright enough to step out of the way.
The big industry change is happening, and we are at the inflection point. Watch closely people, and carefully read each and every press release. If you can see the big picture, this is one shift that won’t be a surprise in hindsight.
He was right about everything but did not account for the vapourware of Vista/Longhorn. That froze the market for years, but now the glacier is melting quickly.
see
The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft
by Charlie Demerjean, December 28 2003.
Since then, the share price of M$ has been mostly flat with a minor pop for Vista in the year of Vista. Check out a ten year chart at NASDAQ. The lack of adoption by business is preventing any pop. The arrival of choice for consumers will be the last straw. That is coming this year.
9451
8750
97
2
0
12800 
5758 
5722 
3886 
1628 
1548 
192 
0 
0 
0 
0 
0 
Charlie is the new Nostradamus. Nice to see such a prediction to become true. Unfortunately (for me), Linux and Open Source was not on my radar (started with Ubuntu 5.10 so in 2005), so this particular writing was not seen by me that time.
I cannot help but to describe things in numbers.
“In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.” [PLA, vol. 1, "Electrical Units of Measurement", 1883-05-03] Lord Kelvin
Ten years ago GNU/Linux was a geeky thing on servers and highly technical desktops.
Five years ago, GNU/Linux was widely used by early adopters and those influenced by them.
Two years ago, there were only a bunch of small OEMs doing anything serious about GNU/Linux on desktop systems.
This year there are only one or two of the largest OEMs not doing something about GNU/Linux on desktop systems.
This year OEMs are tripping over themselves to rush GNU/Linux desktop/notebook/low-end systems to market to stake a real claim to an emerging global market.
The past year has been an explosion of interest/usage of GNU/Linux among ordinary users akin to what the geeks were doing ten years ago.We still do not have firm numbers but several OEMs have put out predictions of millions of seats produced. Growth is exponential with huge rates up to about 50%. ASUS was maxed out and redoubled production. It is always a good sign when the estimates of sales were 50% below what the market demanded. Even Dell which was thinking to sell GNU/Linux to geeks only has realized that the emerging markets are not geeks but they like the features of GNU/Linux: low cost, reliable, and configurable.
Based on web stats, I believe GNU/Linux had about 60 million seats this year. I expect the back-to-school and Christmas seasons could bring that to 100 million. All it would take is a little advertising. ASUS did a very little to get that dramatic response. Schools, students, mobile people can dodge Vista, save cash, and get better performance with very little effort. A lot of this new growth is in addition to the traditional desktop market of M$ but it surely lets the cat out of the bag. The FUD goes “thud” now that almost everyone knows someone who knows GNU/Linux well enough to rely on it. M$ cannot kill freedom and freedom will eat them alive. They have to diversify quickly, accept competition and not kill it, and accept a reasonable profit margin rather quickly or they will become just another face in the crowd within a few years. I expect they cannot change. They will milk their locked-in customers until the bitter end.
Usage of Linux is indeed exponential. Just look as this statistic:
http://media.ubuntu-nl.org/forumstats/users.png
Steadily on the rise since 2005 and it is not showing any sign of degrading, in stead, even the relative growth is is up.
Year 2008, the year of the Linux desktop?
It will take more than one year for GNU/Linux to come to some equilibrium situation as far as share of seats. M$ is allowing GNU/Linux to expand into a vacuum at the low-end. In the middle it is still a bit of a struggle and at the high end only the geeks will adopt GNU/Linux. I think that gives M$ some high ground but there is lots of ground open to go around them. Even if production of GNU/Linux boxes to be sold retail doubles every year it will still take several years to be close to the production of PCs with that other OS. China is still somewhat unknown. They are good at IT and will work hard to sell into their domestic market which can absorb many PCs at the low-end. It is a very dynamic situation. I think the horizon is about six months away and OEMs are trying to gear up for whatever is over the hill.I look forward to June’s web stats.