The last couple of years have been a wild time for Linux. But, when you peel away all the hype, what progress has Linux really made in the marketplace? And, where is it going from here?
What does the crystal ball show for Linux? Now that the breakneck hype of 1999 has subsided, the free OS has some serious work ahead of it. Linux right now is moving into a dizzying array of new places — from watches to scientific cluster farms, to the everyday computer desktop, and while the industry seems to agree that it holds great potential, there remains a lot of work to be done before the penguin really does change the world.
In the beginning of 1999, a team of number-crunchers from the tech industry analyst firm IDC wrote up their annual four-year forecast for the operating systems market. They predicted that 1999 would be a good year for Linux and wrote that if the OS sustained the kind of growth they expected, it would surpass NetWare, gaining the number two position behind Windows 2000 by the year 2001. Not a bad showing really. But, a year later when the company again compiled its report on server OS marketshare, they found that Linux had already surpassed NetWare in 1999. “It happened a little more rapidly than we thought,” remembers IDC Program VP of System Software Dan Kusnetzky.
IDC certainly wasn’t the first company to underestimate Linux, and Kusnetzky says that IDC’s methodology, which only counts software shipments (not free copies or downloads), probably continues to underestimate how much Linux usage there actually is. But, by anyone’s reckoning, Linux has an incredible amount of momentum as a server…
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