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According to Gartner, Microsoft gained share as the operating system of choice in PDA devices in 2006. Suppliers such as Intermec, HP, Dell, Symbol Technologies, and TDS manufacturer the devices themselves. The statistics vis a vis Linux are especially revealing because such "appliances" would be one area where I would think that Linux could make up for lost time vs. Microsoft's operating system dominance (and it would be a much more reasonable market segment to attack than the desktop fantasy of the World Domination 201 crowd).

But there is no relief in these numbers for the OSS players:
-- Linux picked up a tenth of a percentage point but still had less than 1% of the market
-- Microsoft picked up eight percentage points and now has over half the market.
To be clear, there is likely lots of open source software in the RIM, Palm, and Symbian-based devices that hold market share position between Microsoft's 56% and Linux' 1% in Gartner's listing. In fact, there is likely lots of open source software in the Microsoft-based devices. Remember, at least as of late 2005 (and still probably true), the most popular middleware running on Linux was BEA's WebLogic, not JBoss. And conversely, Apache is as popular on Windows systems as it is on Linux. That's open choice.

From an infrastructure software user perspective, these types of statistics are important if market acceptance is important in convincing the boss to go with an OSS tool or application that you think is right for your enterprise. If you are in government, education, or IT services provision, this is probably not an issue. But as I noted in my Feb 7 blog on how Red Hat wants to and plans to grow the ecosystem, for other industries, OSS acceptance is still an issue. I'll keep my eye peeled for more favorable statistics; if you see any first, please comment below.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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