Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users

[Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com>]

Rob Adams wrote:
> The question that remains to answer is: Are the statistics sufficiently
> valuable as to be useful?  What do we compare them to to determine
> market share?  If its just so we can have a counter on the home page,
> probably not worth it.

Well said. I would venture that no, the stats of the type discussed on 
this thread do not warrant addition features (no matter how 
simple/easy/transparent) in Gnome.

Following up the "let's get 10% of the desktop by 2010" with the 
question of how to know how much we have is a natural response. However, 
following up the question of "how to we know how much of the desktop 
marker we have" with writing code doesn't seem to make sense to me.

This is especially true since we sure aren't going to be able to write 
any code that tells us how many *total* computers there are in the world 
- another key variable in determining market share.

Let's leave the market stats (both Gnome's and totals) to firms that 
specialize in it. Rough estimates are the best we'll ever be able to do 
on this anyhow.

If you can tell me in January of 2010 that we have somewhere between 8% 
and 12% of global desktops, but we can't be sure exactly how many, we 
should be too busy celebrating to worry about the exact numbers.

I don't mean to be negative - I just think this might be a bit of a 
red-herring.

Cheers,
Steven Garrity