Number crunching

Correction, 10:45 a.m. PDT: This blog initially misstated Apple's global market share. It was 3.3 percent in the second quarter, according to IDC, up from 2.9 percent a year ago.

Gartner and IDC both see the global computer market rising, 16 percent and 15 percent, respectively, with Hewlett-Packard (18 percent market share) and Dell (16 percent market share) winning big, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

U.S. growth, however, was somewhat tepid at 4.2 percent, according to Gartner. (IDC pegs it at 3.6 percent.) As demonstrated in the earnings calls for Sun, … Read more

France may not have shown up for the Euro 2008 soccer finals, but it continues to demonstrate the most adoption of open-source software, according to a recent report from Forrester Research ("Open Source Adoption: Notes From The Field").

In France, 24 percent of the enterprises surveyed by Forrester are currently using open-source software, with another 15 percent either piloting it or planning to start a pilot within the next year. (I'll wager that the other 61 percent are using open source but simply don't know it).

The United States? It's at 17 percent adoption, with another 11 percent in near-term pilots. Canada is tied with the States, while Germany, along with France, leads.

As noted in the comments to an earlier post, these low numbers suggest that Forrester is talking to the wrong people within enterprises. I'm confident in suggesting that at least 90 percent of these same companies that Forrester surveyed are actively using open source--but the CIO simply doesn't know it.… Read more

With as much as 60 percent of Red Hat's $680 million in FY 2008 revenue coming through its partner channel, The VAR Guy reaches a cogent conclusion: "Red Hat-driven solutions are likely a multi-billion channel opportunity now."

Granted, Red Hat's top competition like Microsoft pushes even more through its channel, but let's not forget that Microsoft is a proven entity. Red Hat, on the other hand, is training a new generation of VARs and system integrators to work with Linux and open-source solutions. It has to be both evangelist and business at the same time.… Read more

Goldman Sachs has bad news for most of the IT economy: IT spending will slip from 7 percent growth to 5 percent growth in 2008. While not yet recessionary, the outlook is dipping dangerously close to that, as its indexes in its latest IT spending report show:

Expectations of budget growth remain down significantly on a year-over-year basis, with many CIOs limiting their purchases to projects with a high and fast ROI. We continue to believe that 2008 IT spending will decelerate to 5 percent from 7 percent in 2007....Demand for discretionary IT projects dropped to its lowest point in the history of our survey, with caution beginning to spread to the offshore providers.

CIOs have emphasized to us that they are buying on a need versus want basis, are often downsizing deals to fit with current budget constraints.... In fact, contrary to general tightening in spending, purchases with an especially compelling ROI are being accelerated in the current environment.

The sky isn't falling, but it's going to scrape a few vendors' heads in a worsening IT economy. No wonder venture capitalists are bemoaning their exit options and returns.

But not everyone is going to get pummeled. In terms of spending priorities for 2008-09, server virtualization and server consolidation were ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, with cost cutting hitting No. 3 and grid computing and on-demand computing rounding out the very bottom of the list. (In addition to open-source software, which is not surprising because people shouldn't necessarily be proactively "buying open source" so much as buying open-source virtualization, applications, etc.)

In short, no one is clamoring to spend money on buzzwords.… Read more

In June, Apple's market share for Mac OS X hit 7.94 percent, according to Net Applications. At its current growth rate of 0.18 percent per month, this means that the Mac should claim 8 percent of the global desktop operating system market by the end of July. Linux, while still holding a tiny 0.8 percent share, is also rising.

The only major desktop OS to decline? Windows. In fact, as the Inquirer notes, while the Mac is up 32 percent, Windows XP actually declined a full percentage point while Vista scraped together a measly 2.56 percent. Overall? Windows was down 2.45 percent.

Mac sales are outpacing PC sales at 3.5 times faster rate. Two big questions are looming:

Windows rules on the desktop, but if you want serious performance, there's only one choice: Linux.

As The 451 Group captures in a great write-up of the most recent Top500 report of the world's fastest supercomputers, Linux is the default choice for 85 percent of the world's fastest computers. Windows? It can barely scrape together 1 percent market share.

The world's fastest supercomputer, built by IBM, uses the xCAT distributed computing management and provisioning tool, created by Egan Ford (a friend and IBM's supercomputer guru). The good news for Microsoft? It's open source. Microsoft … Read more

Over the past few years, Oracle has bought nearly every enterprise software company in existence, but comparatively few database-related vendors (Sleepycat, InnoDB, etc.). This hasn't mattered, however, as it's gargantuan applications business is helping to drive its database business, now climbing to 44 percent of the enterprise market.

Verdict on Oracle's consolidation strategy? Big ambition with big returns. Well done.

Sun is trying to hollow out Oracle's momentum with an aggressive, all-you-can-eat pricing for MySQL, but the real competition in the short term is from Microsoft and IBM.

I'd love to see data on whether … Read more

That didn't take long. Nokia announced just last week that it would be open sourcing Symbian, the world's top mobile operating system by market share, and a few days later Microsoft has started a FUD war against the move.

The ironic thing in this Microsoft FUD offensive is that it's using precisely the wrong example from open source to wage the war: Linux. While it could have found some examples of open source that fragments, is more costly than proprietary software, etc., it chose Linux, which isn't:

[Microsoft's] Rockfeld sums up those challenges with what some might call the "F word": fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, he says, because application software developers have to create multiple versions of their code for different operating systems, or different versions of the "same" operating systems. "There are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones," he says....… Read more

Opera has been striving to break 1 percent of the browser market for years. Firefox 3 did four times that amount in just one week, according to Net Applications.

This not to criticize Opera but rather to laud Firefox 3. If you haven't downloaded it and tried it out, do so. It's lightning fast and stocked with a plethora of add-ons (many of which have, in fact, been updated to work on Firefox 3, and not merely Firefox 2).