Last week at OSCON 2012, O’Reilly released a report sponsored by bluehost. Entitled “Economic Impact of Open Source on Small Business: A Csse Study“, it is a fascinating and highly recommended read into practices for SMB that make a real economic impact.
The focus is on bluehost customers and the survey results were quite interesting. In particular, the client platform used was enlightening.
Survey Respondents client platform: Operating Systems
- 52% Windows
- 24% Mac OS X
- 18% iOS
- 4% Android
- 2% Linux
(Check it yourself on page 14.)
As always, you can find a survey that will prove almost anything you want. I’m seen Linux desktop numbers as high as 14% (Enterprise developers in large corporations) and as low as 0.3%.
To compare, Netmarketshare for June shows a very different story.
Operating System Market Share
- 84% Windows
- 6% Mac OS
- 5% iOS
- 1.6% Android
- 1% Linux
- (and everything else)
Again, statistics don’t indicate absolute perfection since variance from collection to interpretation still exist. But still, this is a big scope difference between these two groups.
I’m not sure what magic is going on here, but this seems a bit unusual.