This is a post I made in reply to some twit on another forum. It might be noticed more here…
Let see. In 1Q of PC sales, “7″ had a shot at 75 million PCs. According to W3Schools, “7″ share rose from 4% to 11%, 7% of about 1300 million PCs = 91 million including some converts. I am sure M$ is very happy.
However, total share for M$ dropped from 89% in September 2009 to 88% in January 2010. MacOS and GNU/Linux had their shares increase. Oops. I guess “7″ is not so wonderful that folks will scrap perfectly good computers just because XP is broken again. XP has 60% share. That’s up for grabs. 15% of the drop due to XP disappearing went to other operating systems, so we could see a 15% share shift away from M$ in the next couple of years.
Where I work there are 40 XP machines with 256 MB RAM. They are not worth upgrading so they will go to GNU/Linux or become thin clients. They work much better that way. When they die they will be replaced with new thin clients for about $100 each. The cost of a new server would be about $25 per machine, so we will get better performance for a cost of only $125 in current $. In a year or two, the cost could be even less.
Looking at current prices:
GNU/Linux Terminal Server
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| AMD64 Motherboard | $100 |
| AMD64 X4 CPU | $200 |
| solid case | $100 |
| PSU | $100 |
| CDRW | $25 |
| 4TB SATA | $400 |
| 4GB RAM | $125 |
| Total | $1050 |
The more people see GNU/Linux and MacOS in operation, the less they will be convinced they must stay with M$. 2009 saw the netbook. 2010 will be the year of ARM on a bunch of things. 2011-2012 could be the end of the desktop monopoly of Wintel.
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