Kaj Kandler wrote: > Benjamin, > good observation. What are the other marketing departments of OSS saying > about this? Mozilla, Apache, Ubuntu, ...? I think this is a wise spread > issue if true and we should focus on making all in the OSS community > aware of it. Can we try to collaborate with some economics professors, > in order to study the general phenomena and then use their research in > order to blog, give presentations at conferences, unconferences, post in > mailing lists, etc.
Having worked with a lot of market research firms in the past (an industry filled with conflicts of interest and poor methodologies), there's a very simple reason why they like to use revenue numbers: it's much easier to compile. They simply call up a company and say, 'we're doing a market share study and would like to know your revenue numbers for x product.' Then, they tally up the numbers and issue a report. In other words, there's very little primary research involved. A REAL market share study would have to look at actual usage but that means those doing research would have to do some real work and solve real problems. The revenue == market share phenomenon exists in many markets, especially software. For example, mysql hardly registers in some market share studies of database servers because a significant number of users get it for free. It also doesn't help that those sponsoring these reports are often the big commercial vendors themselves, i.e. Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc. The only reason why Firefox doesn't suffer from this problem is that the alternative is free too, e.g. IE. Ed > > I think we should pose the question to the researchers, how they measure > the market share. > > Kaj --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
