From correspondent AY:
150,000,000
Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.
<10
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008.
96
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009.
9,000,000
Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, the largest Microsoft beta program in history. [source]
24%
Linux Server market share in 2005.
33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005).
21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009.http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25/microsoft-by-the-numbers.aspx
Those last numbers are especially damning since Linux started with superior technology, has an easier business model if your only goal is market share, and did not have a legacy ball-and-chain anywhere near the size MS has to drag along. But years of directionless bloat have taken a toll and the sponsor driven decisions to go for traditional “server/OS” technology methods in place of trying to find solutions to current customer problems has been very damaging.
Even discounting the obvious PR froth of this article: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Linux-Losing-Market-Share-to-Windows-Server it is an interesting trend.
and just for kicks from April 2000
“During his presentation on scaling Linux to the enterprise, BitMover, Inc. CEO Larry McVoy raised a few furrowed eyebrows at the recently-held Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ). His message: Symetric multiprocessing (SMP) scaling may be hazardous to your operating system (OS) health.”
“McVoy said that the level of harm is “directly proportional” to the amount of scaling and is “worse than linear” in the number of processors. Converting a uniprocessor OS to a four-way SMP OS introduces a “small amount of damage.” Converting the four-way SMP OS to a 32-way SMP OS does even more damage, he told the crowd. McVoy calls this phenomenon “the locking cliff.””
“The bottom line, said McVoy, is that: “Linux needs to have bragging rights on ‘big iron’ to be taken seriously in the enterprise. But the traditional way of getting those rights involves a series of changes which do a lot of damage to the source base. So the problems are that Linux needs to scale, and traditional scaling is a bad idea. Linux will use traditional scaling if nothing else shows up,” he said, “but SMP clusters is a better way to do it. I’m the driving force behind that and I’m not driving because I’m wrapped up in BitKeeper.””
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-04-13-010-06-NW&tbovrmode=3