Market Shares for OS's, Browsers, Search Engines ...

I found some data on the market share of OS's, browsers, and search engines by the major players. I was particularly interested in the market share of Linux in the OS realm. The data is collected using web hits for the month of June 2008. First the OS data.

Operating Systems

Assuming the data is reliable, it is surprising that Linux's market share is less than 1%. Considering how much more user-friendly Linux has become, the many distros that are available for people's choosing, and the great stability Linux has achieved, it is disappointing to see it failing to make serious inroads. May be vendors need to provide customers the option of buying machines with Linux pre-installed. Better yet, computer vendors should provide the option of buying a computer without an OS.

Search Engines

The other piece of data I was curious about is the search engine market shares. Google is clearly the leader and its dominance will probably continue for some time. I expected MSN and Microsoft Live to have a slightly larger market share. It is obvious Microsoft is unlikely to challenge Google's search engine's dominance without the acquisition of Yahoo!'s.

Browsers

Last but not least, the browser wars. Am I the only one who is shocked by Internet Explorer still having 73% market share? It has been inferior to Firefox, Safari, and Opera for many years, yet people still use it overwhelmingly.

Comments

Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...

Tax-and-spend Liberal My Ass

This is a continuation of my earlier posts on economic performance of democratic and republican administrations. My earlier posts include: Politics of the Federal Minimum Wage Democrats Have Kept Unemployment Low Democrats care about poor people Truth About Economic Performance of Political Parties I like to think I have shed light on some facts and debunked some conventional wisdom. In this post, I will attempt to examine the tax-and-spend liberal label put on democrats. Republicans often try to label democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who are soft on national security. While the latter point is based on anecdotal evidence, the earlier is amenable to empirical examination. So, I set out to prove or disprove the notion that democrats often tax and spend in a way that does not yield economic growth. The implication of tax-and-spend liberal is one that puts excessive tax burden on its population and finds inefficient (think socialistic) ways of spending that tax reven...

Correlation Between Taxes and Social/Economic Programs

I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....

Random Thoughts

Search This Blog