Unix/Linux Mindshare - Might Not Be Where You Think
Where’s the mindshare when it comes to various flavours of Unix and Linux? It might not be where you think it is. Let’s take three of the most important: Red Hat (a flavour of Linux); Solaris (a flavour of Unix); and Ubuntu (a flavour of Linux). How would you rank those three in terms of mindshare? I’d somehow thought it would go: Red Hat, Solaris, Ubuntu in that order, with Red Hat being most popular. However, it looks like I’m wrong.
Why do I think I’m wrong? Well, Google Trends lets you explore what people are searching for on the Net, over time. So, here’s the results for the above three OSes.
Red Hat Solaris Ubuntu
From this, it seems that Red Hat is much less popular than Solaris, and Ubuntu is experiencing a meteoric rise in mindshare, becoming more popular than Red Hat at around the beginning of 2005. Currently Ubuntu and Solaris seem to be about level. That certainly isn’t what I was expecting. Note, the above show the results in the United States. You can explore this trend futher at Google Trends.
Phillip Fayers wrote:
You might want to add “redhat” to the search as well. The trend graph for: “red hat”|redhat, solaris, ubuntu looks a little rosier for Red Hat - but then suse is more searched for than either Red Hat or Solaris.
Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 1:55 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Hi Phillip,
You\’re right, quite a number of people are searching (incorrectly) for redhat. The popularity of suse is pretty dependend on geographic location. I was using the US as a forward indicator of mindshare (rightly or wrongly). Even if you do the \”red hat\”|redhat search, restricting by US geography gives you the following rank order of searches today: first place (most searched); second place Solaris; third equal Red Hat and Suse.
See:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=redhat+%7C+%22red+hat%22%2C+solaris%2C+ubuntu%2C+suse&ctab=0&geo=US&date=2006
Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 7:03 pm ¶