Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 21:33:35 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <scottk@wasabisystems.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: I'm looking for Market Research... Message-ID: <001201c09647$ad036860$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <NEBBKBOMKLJPAOKFPGCOEEEFCAAA.scottk@wasabisystems.com>
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Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no place you can get market figures that are in league with the kinds of marketing numbers that come from people like Microsoft. MS generates marketing numbers from their sales figures, which come from all distributors and OEM's that sell their software, as well as retailers. While these figures are very political, (since, for example, they claim anyone purchasing Win2K is running it despite the fact that most businesses still reload Win98 or NT on the new systems they buy) over the years they have been able to make a relationship between the market and future sales. For example they may have arrived at 20% sales, meaning that if they generate a market figure of 20 million users that at least 4 million copies of a new OS release will sell. However, the situation with the Open Source OS's, particularly FreeBSD, is completely different because it is perfectly legal to buy a BSD CD, or download an ISO image, burn it off, then bootstrap dozens to hundreds of other server installs. Since the BSD userbase is more sophisticated than most other userbases there's a greater tendency for this to be done. You can get figures by looking at the download stats and CD sales from Walnut Creek/BSDi, assuming that you can get them from them. You can also look at book sales for BSD and UNIX related books, and website stats for hits on the BSD website. Another way to get stats would be to buy banner ad space on the freebsdmall.com or on other BSD-related websites (like daemonnews) as that can give you daily stats. However, if you want my informed opinion, the very best way that you can get a sense of the BSD userbase is to make a meaningful contribution to the BSD community. It can be anything from a book (like I wrote) to an application program, to a news and information website, or anything like that. For example, look at the vinum program that Greg Lehey has written, it's BSD-only and so it's a given that only BSD users are going to be going to the vinum website at http://www.vinumvm.org Greg is undoubtedly getting lots of useful marketing data from his website stats. You will find that if you want to be a player in the BSD community, that putting your money where your mouth is counts a lot here. There's a number of companies that have made noises in the past about servicing the BSD market, done absolutely nothing for the market, then when nobody pays attention to them they have gone away. Tucows is a perfect example of that, Linuxcare is another. If you want to be a player, (which I assume that you do as looking for marketing data is generally the first thing people do when wanting to move into a market) your going to have to recognize that the BSD market is very young, and the companies and people that are putting money and time into it now are creating, not responding to, the market. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Scott Kundla > Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 1:16 PM > To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > Subject: I'm looking for Market Research... > > > To whom it may concern; > > My name is Scott Kundla. I work for Wasabi Systems, a BSD development and > support company located in New York. I am currently conducting market > research to determine what our potential client base might be. > > I'm looking for the number of xBSD users, in the U.S. and the world, > compared to users of other (proprietary AND open) OSs; > > I'm also looking for a breakdown of users within the BSD community itself > (i.e. % openBSD, % freeBSD, % netBSD, % BSD/OS, etc.); > > Do you (does anyone) know where I can find these numbers? I'd appreciate > any help I can get on this. > > -Scott Kundla > Wasabi Systems > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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