Jethro Cramp wrote:
There was a discussion on this some days ago.
We are all pro SuSE but this is probably a marketing manipulation of the figures. Is this measured by sales (if so what period)? By downloads? By number of installations running SuSE?
This is NOT a manipulation. What on earth makes you think we manipulate?! This is the number of boxes purchased by people during one week as measured by PC-Data. PC-data numbers don't measure everything (not all sales), but in percentage points they are okay, from our past experience. In the weeks when we just had started with SL 7.1 it was RH-Mandrake-SuSE very close together and Caldera-Turbo waaaayyyy behind. The one week with us at 48% is of course an extreme, but we HAVE gained a lot through the recent years. What makes this really exciting is of course not this one release that's great for marketing but is admittedly an exception, but the fact we're still #1 in the latest pc-data report shows it's not just an only-once happening. Each of RH, Mandrake, SuSE can make it to #1 right now with a new release, true. But it's also true SuSE is much bigger also in the US (and not just Europe) than most people thought! The sad news is that Linux sales are still negligible compared to Windows.
When you start looking at it without this kind of information the figures are meaningless.
They are NOT meaningless. It just depends on what you look for in them. They provide valuable hints. They are NOT made-up data, they are real ard facts, and if you think hard facts about real sales are meaningless... oh well.