My apologies to The Highlander franchise (except for The Quickening, which I'll never mention again -- ever) for not accepting the there can be only one approach for every aspect of my life. And to bMighty's Matthew McKenzie, I owe a giant round of applause and thanks for stating quite eloquently something I've been thinking about for some time but have been unable to tame into a post.
McKenzie discusses the importance -- or relative lack thereof -- of Net Application's revelation last month that Linux surpassed 1% of the operating system market share. While statistics has the unique distinction of being an area of mathematics that doesn't flat-out discourage creativity in calculation, and the gathered data depends as much on where it is collected as how it is interpreted -- I feel he's right in his conclusion it's not a win, or a loss, or even terribly indicative of a trend.
Framed in the overall marketshare terminology, the information (or how it was gathered and calculated) isn't necessarily questionable, it's more that it's meaningless. It's nebulous, even when one looks at several months worth of data. I agree with McKenzie that Freeform Dynamics' look at how Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question -- and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions -- and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means.
