Thread: Unix Popularity
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Old 2nd July 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Location: Kosovo, Serbia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ninjatux View Post
I forgot to ask, but you said that server industry is about $60 billion dollars, at least in the US. I'd imagine that the desktop market is smaller no?
You would have to check about desktop market. I would be just guessing.

I think somebody mentioned but I definitely should repeat. Unix and *BSD in particular are masters of appliance market. Probably 70-80% of code in Cisco routers are from BSD. Most embedded device that you find anywhere from washing machine to your car run BSD code. You should check but I think that appliance market is bigger than server market. Probably about 100 billion dollars a year in U.S. alone I am sure that server and appliance market dwarfs desktop many times over.


I agree that Unix is on the rise but not on Desktops and Workstations. Twenty five years ago when there were 200 000 machines in this country 60% were Unix and the rest VAXs with its native VMS. Today is just Windows and little bit of OS X.

Best,
OKO

P.S. I apologize to a power Mac user. Yes body, you are running Unix but 99% of Apple users run GUI. As I grow in the former socialist
country it took me a while to understand church of Apple as its hardware was always TOO EXPENSIVE for us. Unfortunately after Apple has switched from PPC architecture I can not say that I understand you any more. Paying
premium price for commodity Intel hardware with Ubuntish version of BSDs
seems like a very stiff price for a few extra drivers comparing to vanilla *BSDs. On another hand once I got to U.S. and to graduate school Apple was like a toy to me. I was surrounded by DEC, SGI, and SUN stations and I will cherish those times till the end of my life.

Last edited by Oko; 2nd July 2008 at 05:56 AM.
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