[fdn-ann] OS Market shares

["Barbara Heffner" <bheffner chenpr com>]

Thought this would be of interest.  From the451.com and I'm sure
you've seen some other coverage of this report.

Operating systems: who's up and who's down?
John Abbott
GMT Aug 09, 2000, 09:48 PM | ET Aug 09, 2000, 04:48 PM | PT
Aug 09, 2000, 01:48 PM 

San Francisco - Who's winning the operating system wars?
Well, Microsoft, of course, but IDC's recently released figures for both
client- and server-side operating system revenue and shipments
nevertheless show some interesting trends. Taking both client and server
together and looking at revenue, Linux is barely visible with just $67m,
while Windows soars towards the $8bn mark. Those so-called 'legacy'
mainframes still topped $4bn in revenue last year, while Unix was third,
with well over $3bn. 'Others' account for just about the rest of the
healthy total of $17.4bn in revenue reached for the year, with Apple's
MacOS only barely justifying its separation from the 'others.' 

Linux would certainly be languishing with those others if revenue were
the whole story. But separate out client from server, and measure by
installed base rather than revenue, and three operating systems dominate.
Windows, of course, takes a giant 87.7% share of the new licenses. But
Linux and MacOS both have over 10 million users, giving MacOS a 5% share
of the pie and Linux 4.2%. 'Others' made 3.8%. Some 98.8 million client
OS licenses shipped last year, a figure IDC anticipates will have risen
to just under 140 million by the year 2004. It says that both the
Microsoft and Linux shares are likely to rise several points over that
time, leaving Apple's share static – unless of course MacOS X and its
striking Aqua user interface catch on in a big way, a possibility IDC
doesn't completely rule out. 

MacOS X won't run on older Macs and represents a huge technical break
with the current versions of MacOS. Existing Macintosh applications will
need to be ported over in order to run natively and take full advantage
of the new system. None of that bodes well for its future market share.
But MacOS X is effectively Unix under the covers, and could in theory be
ported over to Intel, giving it a wider possible reach. Apple, however,
professes to have little interest in doing this. And some of us still
remember AUX, Apple's previous attempt at Unix, which sank without trace
despite its neat user interface technology. 

If we look at the IDC figures from the server side of things, Microsoft
loses its pole position, at least in terms of revenue, behind mainframes
and Unix. In shipments, Microsoft leads with a 36% share of 1999
licenses, with Linux in second place with 24%, Novell NetWare third with
19% and Unix fourth with 15%. Total licenses shipped reached 5.7 million.
This is where the impact of Linux becomes more evident. New license
shipments rose to 24.4% from 15.8% last year, overtaking NetWare. And
compound annual growth rates will top 28%, taking license numbers from
1.3 million in 1999 up to 4.7 million in the year 2004 – still behind
Microsoft, however, and still likely to garner a miniscule $85m in
revenue in 2004. 

Other than Linux and Microsoft, everything else on the server side is
losing share, despite IDC's forecast of robust market growth for licenses
of 16.7% between 1999 and 2004. Revenue growth won't be so robust,
however, and is forecast to reach just 1% compound annual growth rate
during that time. 

Will Intel's introduction of the IA64 make an impact on the figures by
the year 2004? Intel's delays have given the OS vendors time to catch up,
so Microsoft, Linux (via the Trillian Project) and Unix (Monterey and
other flavors) operating systems should all be available by the time it
ships. But according to IDC commentator Geoffrey Dutton, the situation is
"reminiscent of Digital's Alpha chip rollout nearly a decade
ago." Then, he says, DEC failed to gain enough support from
independent software vendors. This time, the supporting hardware is in
place, and a combination of Internet transactions and multimedia content
is ready to soak up all available systems resources. But any focus on the
high end is still likely to be advantageous to Linux and Unix over
Microsoft.

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