We have an awesome schedule line-up with Free talks: Jon Maddog Hall to deliver the kick-off keynote Friday September 10, Stormy Peters to answer the AM keynote question Who is stealing your desktop and closing keynote of Christopher “Monty” Montgomery on the The Digital Media Frontier.

In a world full of patents, law-suits that stifle innovation and consume the court’s time, proprietary companies who restrict ownership to the hardware and software you paid them for, we need freedom more than ever. If you live in North America, chances are, you can attend the Ohio LinuxFest at near-no-cost when you share a ride or a hotel room with your neighbor.

Your handset, your desktop, your browser, your operating system, your web-based services, your virtualization, your music, your video, your community…. It all can be free… You can be free too.

Register for free today at: https://www.ohiolinux.org/register.html

I am a shareholder of your company. The world is still waiting for your Q4 FY2010 report so that we will know how much money you made as of June 30, 2010. We are all on Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein’s schedule. Mr. Klein, you rival Red Hat posted their FY 2010 report, what is the hold up?

Since I have yet to receive a personal invitation to your shareholders meeting on July 29, 2010. I have several more questions for Microsoft which I will ask from here. I welcome any answers from leadership or the floor.

What is your mobile strategy in a post-PC world? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may try to deny it. The fact is that PC desktop sales have been on a decline, 23% down as of last year. Bill Gates has nothing to do with the day-to-day anymore and it shows.

Your attempt to reach the youth via smart phones was an epic failure. KIN has been pulled by Verizon in a matter of weeks. Anonymous purported employees claimed that the IP you bought acquiring Danger are now wasted and call it as embarrassing as Microsoft Bob. Joe Wilcox correctly predicted Kin’s failure as you fired the leadership of the Entertainment and Devices division just before the Kin product launch. I too predicted in November 2009 that Kin, then code-named “Pink,” would not live up to Mr. Ballmer’s nor Mr. Gates’ vision. How could releasing the Kin under the circumstances be profitable? Why would anybody buy a Kin? Android and the iPhone have cameras, Facebook, Twitter, and more… how could you proceed into the market with less?!? Sure you can say I don’t get it because I am not a teenager but still how can you make a social phone without a calendar? Sorry, the Microsoft brand does not equal cool with whatever crowd you expected to buy Kin.

You bought the wrong smartphone IP. Last year bloggers advised you to buy Palm for their Linux-based WebOS, but you let that HP beat you to it. Now HP plans to ditch Microsoft for WebOS on tablets netting a double loss for you. There goes Mr. Ballmer’s iPad killer. Your excuses come from Mr. Klein who complains that tech mergers are hard to do. Is this fiscal leadership?

With all of the Kin ads you bought, did you once stop to notice that Windows Mobile lost market share to Google Android Linux? Developers are not chomping at the bit to write apps for Windows 7 Mobile but they were so eager to do so for Apple that WWDC2010 sold out. Developers favor Android over Apple’s iPhone OS which makes any platform you put together a third class even before product launch.

What is next, Microsoft, yet another round of layoffs? No wonder Business Insider is saying “Microsoft’s Business Could Collapse in 2010.” First Google ditches Windows on security concerns. Next, IBM names Firefox its web browser standard. Microsoft apologist, Ina Fried reports that Microsoft is now forced to offer no-cost Office options in order to compete with OpenOffice.Org and Google Docs. How does firing people now help you make products that actually sell?

Microsoft, I can not say I did not warn you as I have been warning you of your demise here at whatwillweuse.com. I do not stand alone as Computer World is ready to admit: Linux could become the world’s most popular operating system. Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft, you will lack majority market share. What are you going to do about it?

Sincerely,

Beth Lynn Eicher

I started this blog to keep personal notes of what exactly is Microsoft’s market share. Never did I ever expect a crowd of 28,460 unique visitors to care about what will we use when Microsoft has a minority market share. Thank you all for making me the tribal user of What Will We Use where we watch Microsoft’s market share until FY 2011 close.

First I defined where Microsoft claimed to have a majority market share.Then Nick and I agreed to watch w3counter’s market share reports.

There were only 3 which held any merit as of June 2009: Desktops, Browsers, and Office Suites.

How are we doing one year into it?

1. Desktop Operating Systems

In the past twelve months Windows market share went from 88.09% to 83.11%. The Windows XP product, which continues to hold the largest market share went from 69.74% to 49.95% of the total desktop operating system market share. The trend is showing as people divest from older Microsoft technologies, they do not “upgrade” to Windows Vista or Windows 7.

The next 12 months will bring a new breed of tablets and notebooks which will run  Ubuntu on ARM. These will sell like hot cakes so that people can watch Google’s youtube and play games of Facebook. The desktop is over, even in the corporate sector.

Here’s the dirty secret behind this mind-boggling growth — and the two words that will put an end to the party

IT consulting firm IDC reports that every dollar a company spends on a Microsoft product results in an additional $8 of IT expenses.

And one IT expert admits, “Trillions of dollars that companies have invested into information technology have gone to waste.”

Yet, companies have had no choice but to run these obscenely expensive and highly inefficient networks.

But that’s all about to change…

And that’s precisely why the two words “cloud computing” scare the hell out of Bill Gates.

…

And Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has even written an entire book on the subject, entitled The Big Switch. In it, he asserts: “The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age.”

He goes on to make this prediction: “Rendered obsolete, the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal — a ‘thin client’ that’s little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet.”

While that may sound far-fetched, in the corporate market, sales of these “thin clients” have been growing at over 20 percent per year — far outpacing the sales of PCs.

According to market-research firm IDC, the U.S. is now home to more than 7,000 data centers just like the one constructed on the banks of the Columbia River in 2005.

And the number of servers operating within these massive data centers is expected to grow to nearly 16 million by 2010 — that’s three times as many as a decade ago.

quote courtesy of Motely Fool Newsletter called

The Two Words Bill Gates Doesn’t Want You to Hear…

Plus, the 2 companies poised to rule the post-Microsoft world

“

2. Web Browsers

In the past twelve months Internet Explorer went from 57.6% to 45.7%. As far as Nick and I are concerned, this one is won in my favor. It is still fun to watch low low can Microsoft go? Google’s decision to turn off youtube.com support for older browsers was a fatal blow for IE6. All market share browser counters show Microsoft hemorrhaging market share. In June 30, 2011. IE9 will not save Microsoft since they have decided to not support it on Windows XP. Since Microsoft’s key operating system user demographic is XP, turning their back on their legacy customers will be the last straw. Seriously, how many people are going to buy a new PC just to run a proprietary web browser when Firefox and Chrome are free?

3. Office Suites

It is very possible I have this one won too. Last month I proposed to Nick that we use Oracle’s OpenOffice.Org download figures to count as missed profit opportunity. As of the time of this post OpenOffice.Org 3.x has 159,894,085 downloads which represents $55,962,929,750 loss. That’s Almost 56 MILLION dollars that Microsoft coulda-shoulda-woulda had. Will Microsoft make that level of profits in their business software division come FY2011 market share reports?

Meanwhile, Google Apps continues to pick up market share with their Microsoft Exchange migration tool…

Over 500,000 companies — including GE [NYSE: GE] and Procter & Gamble [NYSE: PG] — have already signed up for Google Apps.

This grab bag of business applications can be purchased and run over the Web for just $50 per year and is just one of many Google products now giving Microsoft a run for its money.

Considering that Google Apps costs just one-tenth of what a traditional business software suite does, it’s no surprise that more than 2,000 businesses are signing up per day.

quote courtesy of Motely Fool Newsletter called

The Two Words Bill Gates Doesn’t Want You to Hear…

Plus, the 2 companies poised to rule the post-Microsoft world

Microsoft’s Sharepoint product which is heavily tied to Microsoft Office 2007 is not for long either. Customers seeking to use free software to manage their intra-net content can do so with Alfresco. They’ll even help you migrate.

I am as confident as ever in my assertion.

Yes indeed Bug One will be RESOLVED.

Nick will pay me $20.

GandhiCon4 is afoot.

We will win the war. We are at war with Microsoft. We have always been at war with Microsoft. Come June 30, 2011 Microsoft will lose majority market share.

At the time of this posting we use:

CentOS release 5.2 (Final), a no-cost Enterprise Linux based on free software.

Apache, the free software web server which has a majority market share.

WordPress 3.0, the free software blogging tool you see now.

W3Counter a proprietary no-cost analytics package which shares global market share statistics (operating system/browser/screen/nationality of the traffic of their subscribers website. This is where we get the statistics at the top of the page at the tag-line. What Will We Use reports its own visitor activity on via reports.

Now we are publishing each post under a Creative Commons “copy-left” style license. You are hereby permitted to reuse www.whatwillweuse.com content as long as you attribute.

Please do leave a comment if you see any opportunities where we at whatwillweuse.com can be more free and transparent.

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The Reasons for Change

1. I’ve upgraded to “Comment Info Detector” plugin for the browser and operating system of the commenter. It supports Chrome and tries to discover Windows version and Linux distribution. My only complaint is when someone comments with a non-Safari WebKit browser, it may present as Safari.
2. The former theme, with a Windows 7 inspired look, could not cope with Comment Info Detector login. I played with some themes, but they were too complex for phone-based browsing. I’ve ended up with a theme which reminds me of the bird logo of OpenOffice.org, an non-Microsoft office suite.
3. My links have changed. If you get this blog via a rss feed, you may want to visit http://whatwillweuse.com with your favorite browser and operating system.
4. Since I was making changes that could break things, why not tinker some more! I tried some plugins. Some plugins were a win. Other plugins created more breakage. If you have a bug to report, please comment on this post or email bethlynneicher AT gmail d0t com

My favorite plug in that came out of this was dynapoll.net which embeds hosted surveys in WordPress like below. The DynaPoll people are super nice who are genuinely curious about their user community. This is stuff that Microsoft would never be able to compete!

Today, I, a life-long Pennsylvania resident I declare early victory with 1/3 of the bet behind this blog: Microsoft will no longer have majority market share on June 30, 2011.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Microsoft no longer has a majority browser market share.

W3Counter watched the traffic of the 32,245 customer websites for the 31 days of January 2010 and reported 49.7% Internet Explorer use. I knew this day was afoot and I predicted IE’s demise at the end February 2010 two months ago. Thanks to all of you who signed up for a free w3counter account, we all get the best global market share reports.

Dan Grossman of W3Counter, also of Pennsylvania, put together these beautiful graphs that show the trends specific to Microsoft Internet Explorer’s demise. Observe the users of the legacy product, Internet Explorer 6 declining over time and look how other Microsoft products fail to directly answer the version 6 loss.

As far as browsers go, the “what will we use” question has been answered: Open source browsers such as Firefox and Chrome seem to be taking Microsoft’s market share. GandhiCon 4 here we come.

Sure, I am a crazy Linux using, free software loving, groundhog watching, winter loathing, anti-Microsoft FUD spreading, Pennsylvanian who correctly predicted browser market share.

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During this time, I have been able to reflect on my surroundings. I will give you one story from my time on the ground. While in a waiting room, I met a woman who saw my netbook with my ubuntu user sticker. She proudly told me that her home has been Microsoft-free for years. When I showed her this blog, she asked me what I thought of the Bill and Melinda Foundation’s recent contribution to Pittsburgh Public Schools. I thought about it and replied that IF this is an attempt to get more Microsoft in front of children, then $40 million in 2010 is  too little too late. You see, for about 30 years a local super market chain called “Giant Eagle” has been buying Apple products for schools in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio as a customer rewards program called “Apples for Students.” Bug one was never really an issue around here – not in the 1980′s and not today. When I graduated from Baldwin High School in a suburb of Pittsburgh, I used Netscape, Applewriter, and MacOS. It was not until my first college class in 1996 that I had Microsoft products in the classroom thanks to Giant Eagle’s Apples for Students.Was it a good marketing for Giant Eagle to bet against Microsoft? Right now I’m blogging about Giant Eagle and thanking them for caring about the education of generations of children. What will the Class of 2011 of Baldwin High use? Not Microsoft.

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Before I get started, I need to apologize that the commenter browser/OS detection plug-in, Browser Sniff, has been reporting falsely for Chrome-based browsers and Windows 7. I use with w3counter for my monthly reports which has nothing to do with Browser Sniff. Rest assured, the reports from w3counter are right on. Just to be sure, I also subscribe to Google Analytics and the numbers line up, month after month.

My preference for web analytic service and market share reports is w3counter. If you have a website and you would like to have some no-cost information on your visitors, sign up for w3counter. Nor do you you need a fancy website, programming skills, or your own domain name. If you can paste one line of html/javascript into your index.html, you too can use w3counter. Everybody can do this. This is another unpaid endorsement from a very happy w3counter customer.

Now onto the browser report of the whatwillweuse.com visitors for the month of December 2009

1     Firefox 3.5      68%
2     Firefox 3.0     13%
3     Internet Explorer 8.0 4%
4     Mozilla 1.9 3%
5     Safari 4.0 2%
6     Chrome 4.0 2%
7     Chrome 3.0 1%
8     Internet Explorer 7.0 1%
9     Identification Blocked 1%
Less than 1% goes to Internet Explorer 6.0

And the Operating System Report of visitors of whatwillweuse.com

1      Windows XP 28%
2     Windows Vista 18%
3     Windows 7 18%

The top 3 make 64%. Where are you team Linux and Apple?

4     Linux 17%
5     Mac OS X 14%
6     Unknown 3%
Less than 1% goes to Windows 2003, iPhone OSX, Windows 2000, iPhone OSX, Windows 2000 and Android. One sole FreeBSD user. Zero ChromeOS visitors yet.

Note: If you read whatwillweuse.com through RSS or a planet feed, your visit is not recorded. Only those who browse whatwillweuse.com are recorded. Therefore, in order to be counted, please type http://whatwillweuse.com at your browser at least once a month. Link-love is always appreciated. Thanks!

Click on the W3Counter logo to see the Browser/Operating system global report for December 2009. Note that the IE global market share is 50.3% according to w3counter. Soon enough, Microsoft will no longer have claim to majority browser market share.

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Some cold days ahead for Microsoft, thanks to radix999 on flickr

over a $20 bet. When some people make predictions, they say something without ever expecting any accountability. By being as public as possible, I have the opportunity to document the process. I celebrate both the journey and the eventual victory. Some people fly to Las Vegas for March Madness to place a wager on their favorite teams where the wager itself costs more than the trip. No matter how this goes, Nick and I are having a blast along the way.

Discussing the fate of Microsoft been so much fun, one commenter we only know as darryl wants in on the action. My hesitation is not about the money I will not bet you, darryl, 1000 United States dollars because I do not know you. Moreover, your IP address suggests you are from Australia so I don’t know how we could set up such an arrangement. By the way, you never answered my question regarding if you are a Microsoft employee.

In any case, this is my counter offer. I buy 33 shares of Red Hat. You buy 66 shares of Microsoft. Since both companies stock prices are about $30/share, we will accomplish the same idea as your proposal without ever having to meet.

For the record, I never said that Microsoft is evil. It is actually a little said says I, a Microsoft user since 1992 and a Linux user since 1999. Microsoft used to make products which made customers happy. That all changed with Vista. Without Bill Gates, Microsoft has been sinking in turbulent seas. So what is Microsoft doing about it? They’re hiring a “Competitive Marketing Manager.” and strangely, I meet the qualifications. Should I apply?

Nah… I will just stick to my wacky prediction:

Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft will no longer have majority market share.

Since I am footing the hosting bill of whatwillweuse.com, I invite you, the reader, to make your own technology prediction for 2010-2011 on my hosting dime by leaving a comment in this post. I promise to continue to host this post until at least January 4, 2012 to see what happens just for fun.

Here are some examples to get you started…

What will happen with the mobile market?

Will MySQL fork?

What will the clouds look like a year from now?

Will Steve Ballmer be fired?

How far will Apple’s market share grow?

I predicted last month that W3Counter would deliver a less-than-50% IE use on the February 2010 report thus winning 1/3 of the bet.

As I close this post, I wish to toast Microsoft itself, as your Windows have seen better days but bravo for shipping Windows 7 before calendar 2010….

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FUD is a Mexican brand of lunch meat and cheese: thanks to camerasutra on Flickr

A commenter a few posts back assertsthat I, Beth Lynn Eicher, give the Free and Open Source community a bad name because I said that Microsoft executes Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt. I could site example by example of where Microsoft spends their time, money, and energy saying bad things about Linux. That’s not what this post is about. Even if I were to make whatwillweuse.com a discussion on deli products instead of the decline of Microsoft, other bloggers would be out there telling that story.  Why in the world have I committed to writing about the decline of Microsoft until June 30, 2011? Well, I made a personal bet with my friend Nick that Microsoft would no longer have majority market share by that date. When I started blogging about the subject in June 2009, I had intended it to be a way for Nick and I to keep tabs on our bet to make it more interesting. I expected maybe a dozen or so mutual friends would get a chuckle out of it. Never would I expect that there would be over 17,500 spectators to the discussion six months later. Agree or disagree, people care about the prediction that there could be a world in the not to distant future with significantly less Microsoft software.

Sure, it would have been nice to be better known for my work with the Ohio LinuxFest and other FOSS volunteer work that I have done for the past ten years. Those who read this blog consistently know I do use this blog to resolve conflict within FOSS.  The debate on if and when Microsoft will fall is something that people want to read, regardless as to who is saying it. If that makes me an anti-Microsoft FUDer, then so be it, but by far I am not alone. The shoe fits. I wear it and advise Microsoft to do the same.

I am not the first to predict Microsoft’s demise with Linux to the better. Heck, I am not even the first to predict a dramatic drop in a 24 month period. Be sure to put Newsweek and Techblorge on your list of people who are calling doom for the software giant. What makes my prediction unique, is I allow you, the spectators of this $20 bet, participate in the discussion of what will we use on June 30, 2011. Now that is community.

Early on, Nick gave me several opportunities to back out.  I declined because I was really liking what I was hearing out of Microsoft.  I noticed them taking the time to fight Linux, which makes me wonder why they would do that if they did not perceive a potential for loss of market share. Moreover, for every moment that Microsoft fights with FUD, it brings Linux closer to winning. How does that work? Microsoft can not keep up with both open source and Apple.

The harder they fight the less resources they have to go into product. Customers are running away from Microsoft products. Everyday I see people dumping Windows for Linux or MacOSX. Even former Microsoft apologist, Don Dodge, has gone Google. From what I can see, Microsoft is shrinking. It would be to Microsoft’s benefit to get out of the FUD business and focus on selling out of Windows 7. That way it could be an example of a successful American company like Red Hat instead of General Motors.

So, please keep dishing the FUD, Microsoft. Meanwhile, consider the following…

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