iPhones as Tagged Fish at Robert Pogson

If a biologist wishes to count fish in a lake, he can do it two ways:

harvest/count each one, or
tag a known number of fish and go fishing later

The iPhones are everywhere, in 80 countries. We know how many there are. They are like tagged fish.

NetApplications counts iPhone hits in its web stats. Lately, they are reporting

.95% GNU/Linux
5.12% MacOS
.35% iPhone

Let us do the maths as biologists might. According to Apple’s production numbers there have been 26 million iPhones sold. If the ratio of iPhone to GNU/Linux holds true we can estimate the number of GNU/Linux surfers out there as

26000000*.95/.35 = 70000000

remarkably close to M$’s estimates of 7% of PCs. On top of that must be many GNU/Linux thin clients connected to terminal servers of that other OS and folks changing their UserAgent string to fool silly web sites. Since the iPhone is an expensive toy, I expect it is not numerous in the same parts of the world where Macs are not numerouse, most of it. Thus I would put 70 million, about 6% of PCs as the lowest estimate of GNU/Linux share. Why, then, does NetApplications rate GNU/Linux so low? They must have a seriously biased sample. We knew that already as MacOS share was shown much larger than Apple’s unit shipments would indicate.

Those who claim GNU/Linux has a 1% share or smaller are fooling themselves. GNU/Linux is mainstream and continues a healthy rate of growth. I expect this to continue for years as eventually retailers will be forced to offer GNU/Linux more widely by demand of customers. I expect anti-trust enforcement may reach OEMs shortly. Interfering with GNU/Linux with OEMs and retailers attempts at selling GNU/Linux wreaks of illegal tied/exclusive dealing. We should see. It could be that the consumers and independent OEMs may settle the matter without enforcement. M$ just has not enough money to pay everyone off. Their loyal partners will diversify as soon as the cash cow dries up. Another few down quarters for the client division should do that.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.