This is te slightly revised post of the data, with the precise numbers
obtained now:
German PC magazine "C'T", in my view the most serious of the kind of
"special interest" periodicals, in its first edition of this new year
published a graph from an own survey which I find simply exiting. It
sheds a very different light on the real landscape of OS use.
Among the online respondents, nearly 17 per cent declared to use DOS;
the most used Windows version was W98 with 56 per cent, but Linux was
used by a full 57 per cent of the users; Apple/Mac had 5.6 per cent,
(this corresponds to the "others" in the categories of the graph).
I received the precise numbers used for the graph and thus the
following table corrects the approximation done from reading off the
graph.
"Stretched" values of the user answers, calculated as "ALL USES" (in
distinction from "per cent of all USERS which use [a given OS]", result
in the distribution of the second and fourth columns - note well that
the sum of the first and third columns constitute the base "100" for the
second and fourth columns:
[1] [2] [3] [4]
Operating Users, p/c All USES Plan to buy: Future
System using OS of OSs -for OS use OS uses
---------- ---------- --------- ------------ ---------
% % % %
DOS 16.9 8.0 9.8 4.9
Windows 3.x 1.6 0.7 1.1 0.5
Windows 95 13.1 6.2 3.5 1.8
Windows 98 56.4 26.8 49.5 24.8
Windows ME 6.6 3.1 20.0 10.0
Windows NT3 >0.1 >0.1 0.0 0.0
Windows NT4 16.0 7.6 8.0 4.0
Windows 2000 27.5 13.1 40.4 20.3
Linux 57.4 27.3 55.1 27.6
other Unix 4.9 2.3 4.1 2.0
OS/2 4.5 2.2 3.0 1.5
others 5.6 2.7 5.9 2.5
------ ----- ------ -------
(N=3547) 100 (N=7470) (N=564) 100 (N=1125)
The question was:
"Which operation system(s) do you have installed on your PC ?"
There was a multiple-choice list given with the categories mentioned
in the table.
The unpublished data about the repartition of multiple use of OSs -
how many used which together with which other(s) - are not accessible
(yet) but the information was given that 7 per cent had indicated using
Linux only.
The magazine presents voluntary, active responses from ONLINE visitors
at their website shortly before Christmas, from 8.th to 13.th Dec.2000
(i.e., people who had filled in and remailed a form).
Total number of respondents was given as "more than 4000" of which,
after "weeding out obviously nonsensical and unbelieveable" responses,
finally 3,547 forms/answers were taken as "believeable". There was some
control of double participation.
The poll was done in the context of gauging the PC market, though,
aiming at an assessment of present (Xmas season) and future general
market developments: Many of the questions concerned satisfaction with
performance and functionality of presently owned hard- and software, and
motivations for buying new in view of insufficiencies of the present
equipment. Nearly half of all respondents were presently content
though with what they had, some 16 per cent (565) intended to buy new
under the Christmas/Winter season, the rest of the (larger) half
intending to buy a new PC would perhaps do that later in 2001.
The paper gives some _own_ caveats about the representativity of these
data: First of all, the poll was geared towards _online_ visitors who
would have, or would not have, the intention to buy new gear (thus,
individual, most probably then [too] "home" users); less than one per
cent of respondents had not yet an own 'puter (i.e., were logging in
from work or other place); the users of the online services of the
magazine's publishing house are certainly not representative, neither
for the total PC user population nor for the population at large.
The "pro-technological" bias, which the paper claims for itself and
assumes among its users, is characterised in the article with the
remark about "the participation of Mac-users, 5.7 p/c, in our online
clientele [being] considerably higher than the market share of Apple
of three per cent in Germany".
But more than that, it's the flabbergasting part of Linux use which is
definitely an indication of a "high-tech bias". The magazine is not "a
Linux paper" even if it carries a lot of Linux relevant stuff by now
too, but it was open to other-than-Microsoft/INTEL-themes from its
beginnings in the mid-eighties; it has a broad range of rather in-depth
coverage of PC/IT issues, thus making it "high-brow", in addition to
high-tech (compared to the high public relation content of most of the
other "special interest" print in this field), but AND and, it is indeed
popular in terms of copies sold (if I guess correctly, the second
biggest selling of all computer magazines in German language). However,
as these were responses to a poll on a public web site, visitors there
would not necessarily have the same interest profile as the paper's
readership.
Factors like these and some more have to be taken into account with any
interpretation of the data. Those "leading edge" biases even come to
bear in an other account given, on the present hardware equipment of the
respondents. The distribution of OSs' used is the more astonishing seen
the hardware the respondents declared to use - there must have been less
than 0.1 per cent using a pre-Pentium age PC:
Units with x86-type processors with whichrespondents work with at
present, in per cent:
INTEL Pentium, -MMX 11.6
Pentium Pro 0.9
Celeron 11.8
Pentium II 16.2
Pentium III 14.8
Pentium 4 .
AMD K5, K6 3.3
K6-2, K6-III 20.5
Athlon 15.3
Duron 2.9
other 2.2
------
(100)
(This sum of "100" would then be approximately, but not completely,
identical with the 100 - 5.7 [Mac] = ~ 94 p/c respondents using one of
the specified OSs in the table above. These data are from a pie-chart
with percentages printed out.)
Heimo Claasen (Journalist) Brussels 2001-01-21
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.revobild.net
35 Rue du Marteau B-1000 BRUXELLES t. +32 (0)2 217 86 07
To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message.
Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
More info can be found at;
http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
