Simon Phipps's Blog

Market Share or Sponsor Share?

According to Kirk Pepperdine, Gartner does not include open source application servers in their surveys. Two interesting comments from Kirk's article:

The next question is, how does open source get reported? By definition, open source draws no licensing revenues and by definition carries a 0% market share. Is it just me or am I right in saying that it just feels wrong to be basing an important decision on a report that cannot accurately describe the usage of all the offerings in the space that is being considered?

Kirk has no ideas how else to handle the problem, of course, but he does think it may be a sign of the maturity of J2EE that the problem exists:

What it does say is that our choice of application server almost seems random, which is what you'd expect to see in a commoditized market where you should not find any differentiating factors between competing products. If I recall correctly, this was one of the original objectives behind the J2EE.

[Also posted to Webmink]

Comments

• indeed
  How can you ever know the installed base of something of which no sales figures are available?

  Sure, jBoss may have a million downloads a month. But 99% of those are either people just getting the latest build every night or people wanting to give it a try who never adopt it.
  Then there's the people that use it and download another copy to replace the one they got originally and got lost to burn it on CD.
  Of course some of those then get distributed elsewhere but that doesn't compensate by far for the clutter in the download figures.

  I have some idea of download figures. At least one company I know of moved all downloads to a server accessible only to paying customers (used to be everyone could download it and you'd get a screen to enter your license key on installation) because they were getting some 100+ times as many downloads as there were licensed users.
  The backlash against that move from the piracy community was instant, complaints started coming in all over the place from people who now could no longer access "their" files (which they never purchased).
  Their try-before-you-buy software got even higher percentages of non-purchases.
  Free software would be even worse than that...

  Posted by: jwenting on June 11, 2004 at 01:21 AM

• How do you measure market share?
  This question has two sides: First, do you measure market share by dollar, or by the number of copies sold/in use in the market? By the first method, JBoss would have a 0% market share, but by the second, its market share is non-zero.

  Second, just how do you determine the number of units in use? I've downloaded and installed JBoss, but I don't really use it. Then again, even commercial products can end up as "shelfware".

  It may be impossible to get an accurate number for JBoss's market share, but that number is certainly not zero.

  Posted by: jimothy on June 11, 2004 at 05:56 AM

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