Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 12:29:22 +0200 From: Phil Regnauld <regnauld@ftf.net> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Market economics and subjective reality (Re: Sorry, I just couldn't let this go by...) Message-ID: <19990902122922.16712@ns.int.ftf.net> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19990901193136.00c4f360@localhost>; from Brett Glass on Wed, Sep 01, 1999 at 07:51:01PM -0600 References: <4.2.0.58.19990901152642.047b0250@localhost> <804.936177954@localhost> <4.2.0.58.19990901152642.047b0250@localhost> <19990901185228.A9481@quark.feynman.com> <4.2.0.58.19990901193136.00c4f360@localhost>
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Brett Glass writes: > curves that David posits, their market shares would remain constant. But > there ARE other OSes, of course, so we must introduce them into the equation. > What is the effect of doing this? Well, because FreeBSD has far fewer users > than Linux, those other OSes cut into its market share more, on a percentage > basis, than into the market share of Linux. (The disparity increases as Linux > pulls farther ahead of FreeBSD.) So, FreeBSD can (and does!) see a decrease > in market share even as Linux sees an increase. For once I'll reason at your level: YOU estimate that FreeBSD can only survive/be viable/whatever if and only if its relative share / market share as compared to other OSes is high enough -- something like: "exponential is not enough, since factor 2 growth means FreeBSD will have 6 million users less than Linux (whatever that means), then 12 million less" (even if we'll still have the same ratio) Jordan (and most other people here -- shoot me if I'm putting words in people's mouth, don't worry, they've been sterilized) are saying: "it doesn't matter what the market share/user base ratio is, as long as we get at least 1 million users, with the following objectives: 1 million users: people will develop drivers for us 2 million users: companies will develop drivers for us 4 million users: people will write stupid articles, but get us notices, and start using BSD outside prod. environments 8 million users: we can find a scape goat to be our Messiah, even if he's Finnish I think it's about "miminum user base for survival and healthy activity" vs. "we're not good enough! we're gonna die! we can't be Pepsi, we have to be Coca-Cola!" Err.. -- Division by Zero error -- multiplying by zero to recover. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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