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TurboLinux Claims to be Number One OS in Japan 173

Posted by Roblimo from the way-to-go dept.
According to a company press release published today on Yahoo!Finance, TurboLinux is now the top-selling Japanese computer operating system. Not just the top-selling Linux distribution, but the top-selling OS, period, with sales almost as great as those of the Windows 98 commercial release and the Windows 98 commercial update combined. If only new commercial OS sales, not upgrades, are considered, things look even rosier for TurboLinux, which claims 24.09% of total market share as opposed to 13.25% for Win98 and 10.23% for Macintosh.
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TurboLinux Claims to be Number One OS in Japan

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  • Japan is behind with regards to computers mostly because of their writing system. While latin-based alphabets like, e.g., the German or Spanish integrate quite easy into the anglocentric computing worlds character encoding, Japans 2*50+1940+x syllable and word symbols simply werent possible to implement (or paint readable) on early computers (those were only taught the 50 katakana symbols, but this f*cked up the ANSI-charset) and only in the past few years Japanese has become easily available on all the common computing platforms.
    Maybe this doesnt give Windows that big of a headstart - but still, we're only looking at standalone sales, and windows is distributed alogside a computer usually.
  • I hate to see generalizations like "Japanese are more technically savvy as a whole", but this one is just off the mark.

    Some people in Japan buy more gadgets, but they generally don't know how to work them any better than people in other parts of the world.

    Take a look in a Japanese computer store or bookstore, Windows and _Mac_ still dominate by a long shot. Linux is pretty huge only in the academic, ISP, and ex-pat communities.

  • %25 (Score:1)

    by Bud^- ( 70689 )
    I see they are not totaly honest in this information, and that sucks.

    But the truth is, if at all, Turbo Linux as ~%25 of the sales off the self, not preinstalled, not already running on computers, but ~1/4 of the people that walk into bestbuy or where ever pick up a box full of Linux Love, ~1/4 people snatch them selves a box of Open Source Goodines(TM) w/Vitiam B

    How many people do you think that has a box of Penguin Power are going to recommmened it to their freinds?

    It is the Truth that Linux is growing Rapidly in the Japaninesse market, not as much as yahoo would have your beilieve but the upward spiral for Linux is there man

    I would how this compares to the US market, more or less?
  • Why on earth are so many Japanese people _PAYING_ for Linux software... the only explanations are that they

    a) haven't realised it's free
    b) are not competant enough with their PC's and need to buy a support contract
  • wonder how well FreeBSD is doing over there...

    It used to be fine.. I notice the Japanese typically at these occasions:

    One must state albeit, that there is a language barrier. Most of us Non-Japanese don't speak Japanese and the other way round English seems to be hard for the Nihonjin too. If they cross it, interesting things get revealed often, like a cute new mp3 encode (gogo), last week.

    However this company, under its old name Pacific HiTech used to be the Japanese FreeBSD distributor, might be that this has changed.

  • Re:First stage of World (well, desktop) Domination (Score:4)

    by noom ( 22944 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @12:29PM (#1782875)
    Considering that TurboLinux has such a large piece of the OS pie in Japan, it seems pretty obvious that Japan is being left in the dust. This basically means that perhaps the largest share of PC users in Japan are techies -- not normal end users. Lets face it -- most user don't need to use (nor would they be willing to learn to use) an operating environment as flexible and powerful as Linux.

    I hate to say it, but Microsoft market share in Japan will probably be the best indicator of overall tech-savy in Japan because it means that more and more users are integrating PC use into their normal lives. When a country (at this point in the game, anyway) has such a large percentage of Linux users, it probably means that the market is so small that techies and hackers dominate the market for PCs while everyone else is satisfied to just own a PlayStation.

    For the time being, Linux is still best suited to people who have the ability and prefer the flexibility of being able to fine tune an OS to their own needs. Most non-hobbiest (excluding work-related users) would still prefer a simple system that lets them email, chat, surf, etc... since they have little use for all of the free development tools and customization which makes Linux a better choice for techies (which is why I dumped MS long ago...).

    In short, Japan is still serverly lagging in the 'consumer' (aka 'ignorant end user' (j/k)) market. Maybe they'll make it up by developing better add-ons to Linux to make it more '(End) User Friendly' but I'd bet that "Microsoft Consumer Operating Systems" will almost certainly remain a better fit for most people.

    -NooM


  • Actually, he was talking about adding different distributions of the same OS. You're talking about adding 3 different OSes together. His statement is a lot closer to what the other poster was talking about when he added in the academic version and the VPC than yours is.

  • How'd you do that? The moderation system always removes the dropbox from comments I'd already scored.
  • I once had a math teacher who hated statistics.
    Why?
    Because most of the time they don't tell you anything.
    He said that people doing this kind of statistical stuff decide on what the results should be before doing the actual counting.
    Sure, we love these numbers, but they ARE FALSE.
    Someone wanted Linux to look the best wrt market share (can anyone name a slashdot reader who wouldn't=), but let's face the music.
    _As much as I want Linux to exceed M$ Win*_ I want it to do so fair and square, we've just gotta be patient :)

  • as the Register points out, the figures were for a week's time. One week is hardly a statistically significant figure for OS sales, even if TurboLinux did outsell Windows98 (which, as you point out, it really didn't). Let's see some figures for a year, or even one quarter.

  • True, but they share a lot more in common than DOS, Win98 and WinNT.

  • Re:wow (Score:1)

    by prijks ( 9686 )
    except that if you post to a discussion thread on which you moderated posts, the moderation you did to any posts on that discussion is removed... so this post had 2 points or so removed from it and it had already been moderated downwards by other moderators, so it is now at a score of -2. nifty, you broke slashdot. since the selecty box thingums only allow you to chose a threshold of -1, you have to go into the url and change ...&threshold=-1... to ...&threshold=-10... (well, it only needs be -2, but best be safe, right?) in order to even see the post...

    quite entertaining, methinks...

  • Japan missed the boat (so the US media says) on the PC, multimedia, and to a point, the Internet. From what I've heard, they've been struggling to catch up to US companies. Looks like they're determined not to be left behind again. Nice to see them take the lead like this.

    Question is, how long until the US catches up? I hope our companies and consumers realize what the Japanese have already figured out.

    I wonder how well FreeBSD is doing over there...

  • incomplete statistics (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The total Japanese OS figures quoted in the press release tally approximately 75%. While I don't doubt the presence of more than 25 sub-1% OS's, I do doubt that their total market share is 25%.
  • I'm gonna have fun with this one. And to think all my friends thought I was on crack when I told them that Linux was going to take out MS. "No way man, MS is just too big." HA!
  • This is "retail sales". Nobody buys Windows 98 retail. People get it with their PCs.

    "Fubar Linux has 100% of all sales to red-haired people wearing glasses on tuesday mornings between 9:35 and 9:36 am in Paris, Texas."
  • If you add up all the lines in the press release table that say "MS Windows 98 something-or-other" you get 29.9%. Not to understate how close 24% is to that, but saying it's number 1 is moderately dishonest.

    LJS
  • Who marked this one up? I laughed out loud. Not often that you see sarcastic moderating.

    I really think we should encourage this. Suppose it sort-of defeats the purpose of moderation.

  • I'm sorry, but NO! (Score:3)

    by qnonsense ( 12235 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @11:42AM (#1782897)
    If you add the total market share Windows enjoys you get:


    MS Windows 98 Upgrade 13.25%
    MS Windows 98 9.15%
    MS Windows 98 Academic 3.87%
    MS Windows 98 Academic Upgrade 3.63%
    Virtual PC 2.1 (Win) 1.93%

    Thats a total of 31.83%


    That's 7.74% more than TurboLinux's claimed 24.09% market share...

    Even if you don't count VPC's 1.93%, Windows 98 takes the cake... NOT TurboLinux.
  • These statistics were based on retail sales of software, not hardware. Although virtually every new PC comes with Windows 98, there are a significant number of individuals who actually purchase Windows 98 to upgrade their Windows 3.x or Windows 95 platforms, as the 'Windows 98 Upgrade' number indicates.

    The numbers don't pretend to indicate market share, and TurboLinux was not responsible for collecting the numbers. These values came straight out of Business Computer News. If BCN chose not to include OS/HW bundling in their sales statistics, it was their decision.

    I think you'll also find that there were no lies within the press announcement. The report explicitly stated that TurboLinux outsold every other individual OS. Because each of the variants of Windows 98 has been SKU'd differently and has a different price point, Business Computer News likely chose to separate out the values themselves. Again, that was their policy and not ours.

    I think the only thing we can be said to be guilty of is a little spinning. This is a completely standard business practice, and I think it was justified. We're very proud of Linux, and our particular distribution, and we want the world to realize that Linux is a viable platform. If the article helped convince even one business manager that Linux is a grown-up operating system, and not just a fringe-player, then I think the press release did the community a service.

    Whether you use TurboLinux or not, I think everyone who loves Linux should feel proud to see a distribution achieve this level of market penetration.

    Best Regards,
    Aaron McKee
    Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer
    TurboLinux, Inc.
  • I wonder if they are counting sales of 'Linux Japan' magazine. Every month, it comes out with a different distro on 2 CDs in the back of the magazine, for 1500yen. (~$12) I also see dozens of boxed versions on the shelves here.
    Also, I wouldn't assume that piracy rates here in Japan are the same as in the US. I hate to make statements about the culture as a group, but I can tell you that many Japanese people just will not do something if they know it is illegal. I haven't found anyone here who would rationalize such a thing as a 'victimless crime.'
    I don't know if many Japanese companies would embrace the ideals of open source and the copyleft concept, either.
    Jim in Tokyo


  • You can buy Windows 98 as the full retail version by walking into a store, carrying the shrink-wrapped box to a cash register, and presenting payment. In my case, it was $179 instead of $89 for the "upgrade" version. Both were on the store shelf beside each other. I intended to continue to use Windows 95 on the bench computer (for the EPROM programmer, and talking to emulators and stuff), along with Slackware Linux and NetBSD on several other computers on my home network. So I opted to buy the full-retail version for a new machine, rather than paying $89 for an "upgrade" copy that I would then immediately break the license for (by installing it on a new machine and keeping the Win 95 os online that it was to "upgrade".) Buying an upgrade copy and breaking the license agreement is no different from getting a pirate CD copy from a back alley somewhere.

    Part of the appeal of the free Unix OSes like NetBSD (and free Unix clones like the Linux OSes) is that there isn't a moral/legal burden put on people with multiple machines.
  • Your comparing them to American persons. These guys are taking calc in the 4rth grade. Our idea of technical people is most likely a bit different over there, I would tend to think..
  • I did hear that China had officially standardized on Windows98... They bought a copy.
  • I bet that for some ~ peak three day period when RedHat 6.0 was just released, that it outsold any other OS on the market. That could be said for many products. It's just a matter of picking the right point in time to calculate your derivative.
  • Did anyone else notice that if you add up the percentages, you don't get 100%?

    24.09% + 13.25% + 10.23% + 9.15% + 6.84% + 3.87% + 3.63% + 2.64% + 2.03% + 1.93% = 77.66%

    I can accept a little statistical rounding, but given the precision of their numbers, and the fact that they're off by almost 25% makes me a little more suspicious.
  • Although we were expecting the numbers to go down, as well, we were pleasantly surprised to see that TurboLinux held on for another week. For the second week of it's release, 23% of all retail OS sales were TurboLinux.

    It's expected that sales are usually larger when a product is first released, and that's when most business analysts correlate and publish their statistics. It's not a lie, it's just standard business practice. Microsoft even announces pre-release statistics for orders that are in a queue.

    I think a lot of people are missing the real point of this. Linux is appearing as a viable OS platform to a very large and important segment of the world's computing population. Whether you use TurboLinux or not, this is certainly a "Good Thing(tm)" and is what a lot of people have been working towards for a very long time. One can quibble over how the numbers were calculated, but in the end TurboLinux still accounted for 24% of the sales for operating systems. To a lot of people who don't currently use Linux, this is one indication that Linux is 'growing up' and turning into a mainstream operating sytem.

    Best Regards,

    Aaron McKee
    Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer
    TurboLinux, Inc.
  • Well, I know that if one in four Americans woke up one morning to find their computer suddently had a Unix operating system on it in place of whatever they had learned to use (and used at work, etc.) they wouldn't be recommeding it to their friends.

    I like Unix-like OSes for some of what I do with a computer. Enough that it's installed on several of my home computers as the only OS. I know that there are a lot of people out there in the real world who aren't as into computers for the computer itself who would NOT like a Unix-like OS.
  • You can think of Win98 as a sofisticated Dos distro. Doesn't
    work for NT though.

  • Re:I'm sorry, but NO! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "New TurboLinux Release Number One OS in Japan"

    Clearly this is misleading.

    "TurboLinux J 4.0 outsold every other individual OS product in the Japanese retail channel in its first week, including Windows 98 and other commercial Linux packages."

    This seems OK to me. Notice the italicized words.

    "While the combined sales of all Windows 98 products including upgrades (see below) topped TurboLinux J 4.0 sales, the numbers clearly highlight TurboLinux's impressive presence and acceptance rates in the Japanese OS market."

    This seems to get to the crux of the issue. I'd say the title was bad but the article is OK FUD-wise.
  • Although we were expecting the numbers to go down, as well, we were pleasantly surprised to see that TurboLinux held on for another week. For the second week of it's release, 23% of all retail OS sales were TurboLinux.

    It's expected that sales are usually larger when a product is first released, and that's when most business analysts correlate and publish their statistics. It's fairly standard business practice. Microsoft even announces pre-release statistics for orders that are in a queue. The numbers will certainly go down, but a lot of individuals are only interested in peak values.

    I think a lot of people are also missing the real point of this. Linux is appearing as a viable OS platform to a very large and important segment of the world's computing population. Whether you use TurboLinux or not, this is certainly a "Good Thing(tm)" for almost every Linux user and is what a lot of people have been working towards for a long time. To a lot of people who don't currently use Linux, this is one indication that Linux is 'growing up' and turning into a mainstream operating sytem.

    Best Regards,
    Aaron McKee
    Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer
    TurboLinux, Inc.
  • I'm sorry, but this is narrow-minded, ethnocentric rubbish.

    Have you considered that maybe the vast bulk of the japanese cosumers don't want a huge, heavy, bloated PC?

    A lot of very clever, very tightly packed electronics sells in Japan- a lot of ingenuity is devoted to making things smaller, cuter, neater etc.

    Maybe not everyone wants or needs the computer equivalent of a huge gas-guzzling Chevy. People who have powerful PDAs, GPSsen, mobiles phones etc. can often survive quite well, both at home and away from it.

    It's a radically different society, so to mark it down because it doesn't conform to the American ideal is a bit facile and wrongheaded, IMHO.



  • Mmm, another ethnocentric racist American college weenie. On a KKK scholarship are we?

    Last time I was unlucky enough to be able to check, the vast majority of organised warez puppies were still American, BTW.

    I'm sorry, but I'm really dissapointed at the low quality of the comments on this thread- such a reactionary WASP kneejerk crowd was exactly what I hoped to avoid, by reading slashdot rather than ZDNET.

  • Nice theory from someone who doesn't actually have a clue about the present situation in Japan. The last thing one would imagine is that computers are limited to "techies" here. On the other hand, *home* use seems to be very limited.

    As for Turbo Linux numbers, it probably doesn't include Windows 98 OEM, and includes Turbo Linux distributed with magazines. Only way to explain these numbers.

    [yes, I live in Japan]
  • Sorry about that. Just another media-bred stereotype, it is... At least it's complimentary, which is more than can be said for other widely-held stereotypes.

    Once again, my apologies.

  • LWD: Linux World Domination

    Now that the Japanese are getting smart to Linux, hopefully the U.S. will follow in these wise footsteps.

    (Also, hopefully with the Debian distribution ;-)
  • first of all, i'm chinese, not japanese.

    as for entering commands in the shell, none of the commands get 'translated' to chinese/japanese. it's still ls, bash, dir, etc. it's sorta meaningless to translate something that easy to type to something else. It breaks the normal build processes too.

    as for entering chinese characters, it's actually easier to do it in Japanese than Chinese because the japanese have a standard set of alphabets (hiragana and katakana) and standardized 'spelling'. to enter a japanese character, say, hito (just means men in japanese, or people). one would type HI and then TO. all the katas are mapped to certains keys on the qwerty keyboard. afterwards, the dictionary program finds all instances of words that are pronounced HI-TO (different words may have the same pronounciation in chinese and japanese). you then choose from a list.

    being chinese, i feel obligated to also explain how to enter chinese and how bitchy it is for any native speakers.

    since we chinese don't have any real form of standardized spelling(there's Pinyin, it's popular in the Mainland, but i'm from hong kong.), it makes entering chinese really difficult. there're four main types of input methods. you either learn pinyin (or other ways of spelling chinese, or use some stroke-based input method (there are standardized stroke orders. you always have to write the characters in a particular stroke-order), pen recognition and newer voice recognition tech.

    i don't think these input methods are any good at all because it doesn't make using chinese in a computer as easier as using english. and i think this is also a reason why linux is not doing as well in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan as japan because chinese input programs are still not as well developed as the Japanese one.

    mustapha.
  • What in the world are you talking about? Just because people say that the article is incorrect or misleading, they're MS drones? Actually, it helps the Linux community to have an accurate picture of where we are, so we know where to go from here.

    --bdj

  • Aaron McKee,

    What you are missing is that it bothers a lot of people in the Open Source community when an entity (be it a single person or a company like TurboLinux) misuses the statistics in a way that I would call a lie...

    And no, your little disclaimer in the press release:

    While the combined sales of all Windows 98 products including upgrades (see below) topped TurboLinux J 4.0 sales, the numbers clearly highlight TurboLinux's impressive presence and acceptance rates in the Japanese OS market.

    Doesn't count because the title you used "...Outsells Windows 98..." is still false...

    Also, your comment about "common business practice", that uses Micosoft as an example is very disturbing to me as well..

    Please don't take me wrong, I wish you the best of luck, and will probably take a look at your TurboLinux distro some time in the near future myself...

    /Simon

  • actually if you insist,

    its "mac-an-toish"

    scots gaelic for "son of the chief"
  • Now it's all the way down to -2
    I gues people are getting pissed. I had to modify my URL manualy in order to see it, my threshold is now -9....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • Sorry to burst your balloon about piracy in Japan - most companies have a "don't know, don't care" attitude towards piracy by employees. They might buy one legitimate copy of Photoshop, NT Workstation, or whatever, and then a dozen people will come round and "borrow" it. It happens. Don't generalize about how the Japanese are honest and law-abiding. They are when it suits them, just the same as any other people on the planet.



  • Relax, its playing MS at their own game...

  • Well, Microsoft has seen this move to non-PC platforms quite a while ago. A lot of their press releases emphasize their intention of working with companies similar to 3com. With 27 billion dollars sitting in cash, Microsoft is going to be able to make a lot of friends in this area. That is just the sort of catalyst a lot of these smaller (well, when compared to Microsoft) are going to need to get their products out. And, low and behold, they will be coming out with MS OS's.
  • It's too bad that they had to upgrade past System 7. System 7 is a just-plain-snazzy name, IMHO.

    Of course, it doesn't really say much about what the OS is. And OS X (as I've hard MacOS X called) sounds like a confused upgrade to OS 9. Which isn't at all related to Plan 9.

    Wow. It's really difficult to name operating systems! I always thought that BeOS sounded like an existentialist OS crossed with a perfume from Calvin Klein.

    Linux is okay, but it leads to nit-picking wars (GNU/Linux, "Leenooks", "Lie-nucks", etc.)

    Unix is cool, but when I say, "I like Unix" to my non-techie friends, they always wonder. It sure does sound like "I like eunuchs." And that's just not good.

    Windows is okay, but it's blatantly ripping off something that it didn't invent with a great deal of brashness. NT and CE are silly, but year numbers are sillier.

    Hmm. I can't really think of an operating system name that I really like. I guess Plan 9 is a really cool name, but inside jokes aren't a great selling point. RISC OS is good, I suppose. It tells what it does. But I know nobody uses it.

    Oh well. Enough rambling.

    -awc
  • A few things I notice while reading these boards:

    1. The /. folk may have taken scomputer science, but they didn't take statistics. The stats that are posted are probably wrong, but not for most of the reasons that have been posted here. I'm guessing that the shoddy numbers are because of a poor sample. Go ahead and flame me, I'm ready.

    2. The Japanese, as consumers are very different than the American consumer. If anything, I would say they are more teckie than the average American, but in a different way. They value form as well as function. Most ultralight nitebooks are designed by and/or created for the Japanese market. Just because they had pokemon and that kind of stuff means nothing. The Japanese love technology. That's one reason why all game consoles and lot of games come out in Japan first. They have a greater market presenece in Japan(sony, sega, and nintendo).

    3. One poster was correct when he said that retail sales do mean a lot. If more people are upgrading to TurboLinux than upgrading to Windows98 on their computers, then they are doing something correctly. That means good things for the future.

    remy

    http://www.mklinux.org

  • Are you suggesting that there is a difference?
  • I actually mean to flame... WTF are you talking about?
  • No, it's not "MacOS." It's "Mac OS." If you're going to be anal, be also correct.
  • OK, I admit, I do a lot of posting to slashdot
    (if you look at my id, "Anonymous Coward", you will see that I do *most* of the posting here;
    in fact, cmdr taco has been nice enough to create a special comment page just for me). And its not
    that I'm an MS fool, its just that whenever I can
    twist the facts, I take the chance to do so.

    I can't speak for the other three posters.


  • how does a command line interface work with japanese or chinese characters? do they just use "english" commands (I mean, bash, dir, ls arn't *realy* english).

    I get how they can display character text, I've got my computer rigged up to show chinese and japanes web pages, but *how* do they get them into the computer? it can't be all hand writing, can it? well, anyway. this is somthing I've always wanted to know. thanks
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • it is probably 25% of new sales, not 25% of installed base... yet.
    Of course... that is, until all those bought copies get copied and passed around and installed, and then, the whole of Japan (& the Pacific Rim) will be using Linux!

    Woo Hoo!
  • "When a country (at this point in the game, anyway) has such a large percentage of Linux users, it probably means that the market is so small that techies and hackers dominate the market for PCs while everyone else is satisfied to just own a PlayStation."

    That is exactly why the next year and a half or so will see serious threats to Microsoft coming out of Japan. You're right, the Japanese "ignorant end user" market is content to just own a PlayStation--and a cellular phone (85% of the population) and a palmtop, and a GPS navigator...

    The bloated Microsoft PC is great for American consumers, who can put it in the rec room next to the bumper pool. But it doesn't fit too well in the average Japanese consumer's backpack. Nor does it drive powerful graphic engines for video games (far more popular than movies here).

    The Playstations, cell phones, palmtops, and countless other gadgets are getting more powerfully very quickly, and their combined power and flexibility will soon outstrip that of PCs. Japan will be the first place to realize the dream of "ubiquitous computing" embedded in billions of consumer devices, communicating through the internet. The GUI for the OSes running on these devices won't have windows and icons--more likely kittens and dinosaurs and busty schoolgirls. Unlike American consumers, the Japanese don't need the bland (inter)face of Microsoft to reassure them that they bought the right thing.

    So given that the Japanese techies and hackers at the companies who make these devices are so devoted to Linux, who's to say the OSes they run won't be Linux-based?

    Left in the dust? I doubt it.
  • You probably don't want to see the rest of th list... the table just highlights the major marketshares. People really don't care about some guy buying an old copy of Mac System 7.0 at a garage sale making up .00001% of the OS sales for that week. (IE It has nothing to do with the point they're trying to make)
  • dir works under most linux distributions similar to ls -l, maybe it's just aliased by default or maybe it's in bash, not sure, someone else probably knows more about it than I do
  • Simon,

    I don't want to appear hostile, as I very warmly welcome the criticism and feedback from the community, but I am a bit defensive. Let me first preface these comments with the fact that I was not responsible for the press release. I am, however, one of the engineers here. Please don't construe this as an argument.

    I don't believe the title was wrong because the product "Microsoft Windows 98" is a distinctly different product than the "Microsoft Windows 98: Upgrade" product, which is distinctly different than the academic versions. Functionally, they are similar, but as far as statistics and sales tracking goes they are about as different as OS/2 from NT. Each product has a different SKU, sales channel, and price point. Each is marketed in a slightly different fashion. The news agency that collected the information, Business Computer News, decided to separate out the figures in that fashion because that was their policy. Within this scope, the title was correct: we did sell more copies of TurboLinux than Microsoft sold copies of Windows 98.

    TurboLinux wasn't trying to be deceptive, and I don't think we deliberately said any mistruths, but we did want to boast a bit. I expect this is natural. I think the only thing we can really be considered guilty of is a little spin doctoring. I used Microsoft as an extreme example of what is considered acceptable spinning, although I personally feel that most of what comes out of their marketing department tends to be of marginal value. Most other companies, including Red Hat, try to post as much favorable press as they can. This is what I was referring to when I said 'completely standard business practice', and I don't think we did anything more than that.

    I wish you luck with trying out the distribution. When you do get a chance to take a look at it, please let me know what you think. We're always receptive to ways of improving the product, and the community almost always provides excellent feedback.

    Best Regards,
    Aaron McKee
    Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer
    TurboLinux, Inc.
  • I think this statement quite easily qualifies as flamebait.. This story is insane for other reasons (someone already mention peak interest as opposed to average interest). But your reasons are quite inflammatory and stereotyping of the Japanese culture. In fact, I have quite a bit of modern Japanese music and I like it. As for the Tomagotchi, you have to admit that it was quite a fad here as well.. In fact, you could say america was the home of any number of insane fads. That's the way fads go, once past they usually seem quite insane.. Please attack stories and more technical and relevant grounds in the future if you feel the need to bring them down.
  • Chad Okere, self apointed Unquestioned Lord of the internet

    I question your lordship of the internet, therefor you may no longer refer to yourself as the Unquestioned Lord of the internet

    *Phbbt*
  • Right, and one more reason M$ is dominant in the USA more than the rest of the world is because M$ is a USA company. There's just something about buying American...

    Actually it is a pretty good deal for us Americans. If it weren't for M$, our trade deficit would probably be much higher!

    But do we still want to keep them around? Naahhh...
  • The AC was referring to the usage of the word than instead of then when making comparisons... basically just wasting bandwidth
  • they dont mention that 98% of PCs come with windows98 on them, and they arent counting those as sales. weak weak weak.

    I hate liars, even if they arent the dark forces of evil
  • Mostly people buy upgrades in a retail setting. However you can buy win98 as the full version if you buy if as an OEM. I think this entails purtchessing a HD or some other thing like a motherboard with it so the requirement can be met.
  • How the h*ll does a comment like that get moderated up? To a 3 no less? All it said was "wow". Oh yeah, thats real informative. For all we know the AC was saying wow because they were the first post.
  • So if we add up TurboLinux, Debian, Redhat and Slackware what do we get?

  • I will take you up on that bet. I will bet my house against a can of coke from you. And I will win, because Red Hat 6.0 did NOT outsell any other OS on the market. If it had, don't you think the business/marketing-savvy people at soon-to-IPO Red Hat Inc would have trumpeted it.

    You're right about the derivative, though. Divide the time into picoseconds, and I'll bet there's a picosecond when a copy of Red Hat was being paid for and no copy of Windows was being paid for.
  • A significant number of them can probably afford very good computers. What does 'deserve' have to do with it at all?
  • If you actually read the article you will see that this is very much not true...

    If you add up all Windows 98 percentages you will quickly see that (13.25 + 9.15 + 3.87 + 3.63 + 1.93) 31.83% is bigger then 24.09%

    /Simon
  • Your guess is correct!

    Those of us who use "Highest Scores First" need to know these things.
  • The gaming market is very big in Japan. Sony announced a few months ago that it was releasing and embracing Linux as a development platform for the Playstation 2 (PSX2).

    I think they were releasing the development software exclusively on Linux...
  • Japan is a developed country; its people have enough money to pay for their own computer and software. The open source charactoristic doesn't give much advantage over those heavily commercialized OS's. Moreover, those OS's can easily fight back by innovating or lowering of their prices.

    What Linux distributions should focus on are those developing countries. In many of those countries, the piracy rate is so high that it literally effects the nation's economy. Linux can be cheaply distributed in those countries and easily replace their pirating market. The success of this will benefit both the developing country and Linuxdom.

    Leon
  • Less then Windows, NT and DOS...
  • You know, it is always sort of refreshing to me when a bigot shows (him or her)self to be a bigot for the world to see. Let's see, you dismiss all the human being living in Japan because the tamagotchi was popular there, how nice of you. I could point out that the reason for the Tamagotchi's popularity was the fact that there is enormous crowding in Japan and the children who play with Tamagotchi's are trying to indulge their longing to have a pet to love when their living circumstances make it impossible, but what would be the point? I mean to hear such an arguement you'd need an open mind, and I'm not sure a person like you would even recognize the fact that there were children in Japan, and I certainly doubt that you would think of them as being human children with the same feelings and desires as any other child.

    Well, at least you don't hide the way you feel, I'll give you that.
  • It's posible your logic is flawed, I mean we really don't know all the facts from this press reliase. It could be a similar situation to the US in the 1980s (I belive) when most of the people who owned computers used DOS and were happy with it, and knew what they were doing. but most of the people in general didn't own computers at all.

    but it could also be that more people in general, (or at least %24) *are* techies. I mean japanese culture, as far as I know stresses learning and engenering. Maybe there are just more geeks in japan. we can't really know from this PR, we woudl need a lot more numbers to find out.

    Actualy if you look at the numbers in this peice, I belive it only shows *sales* not *total* share, I don't see how somthing just reliased could grab almost a quarter of the market like that... and most win* OS's come with boxes, are those taken into acount?
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • nither of those OSs was on the list, and I'd be willing to bet that NT could be the "dark matter" in that list there....

    but that wouldn't make it a really intresting PR bit....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • > Nobody buys Win98. People just pirate it.

    Yup. 'Course I un-pirated it shortly thereafter with Linux.
  • I have a question, why does the table only add up to 78.66%? what's the other 21.34%? Product Marketshare
    ------- -----------
    TurboLinux J 4.0 24.09%
    MS Windows 98 Upgrade 13.25%
    MAC OS 8.5 J 10.23%
    MS Windows 98 9.15%
    Virtual PC 2.1 (PCDOS) 6.84%
    MS Windows 98 Academic 3.87%
    MS Windows 98 Academic Upgrade 3.63%
    RedHat J 5.2 2.64%
    Vine Linux 1.0 J 2.03%
    Virtual PC 2.1 (Win) 1.93%
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • This cool stat isn't what you think. This is hype! The sales stats cited are only for the first week of July. Which is VERY important. That means that in the first week after the software became available in Japan it dominated. MacOS, Windows et al have all been selling for months there. What you are seeing is the intial interest spike as people rush to the stores to get it. (Remember people lining up when Windows 95 came out? ) Check back in 4 or 5 weeks and see how it compares then!
  • Japan is not anymore a "haven" for software piracy then the US is (althoug, in my exsperance that's not saying much....). however China, Koria Maylasia, are very deep into piracy. In any of the "poorer" asian contrys, this is a problem. Japan is not a poor contry by any means
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • ~25% of the market share, that is more than ALL distrubation have in the United States, right?

    acutaly, I dobut that, although I don't really know. I mean how many people go out and buy an MS-OS? most of the people I know who build new systems just copy it, and it comes free with a new computer (as far as *retail* sales of OSs are consurned, these sales don't count)

    and with sites like cheapbytes.com, I'm willing to bet there are a lot of linux sales in the us
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • *sigh* Are we going to start that old "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux" thing again??
  • Does it seem _really_ weird to anyone else that they listed VirtualPC as an operating system, when it's actually an emulator? I know, it comes with Windows, and that's what they were counting, but it still seems really weird. They definitely need to count OEM sales.
  • Message from Tokyo, Japan...

    Now, don't be tricked with Cliff Miller's propaganda.

    May be the press release aren't counting the OS's bundled with new computers.

    Actually I don't see anyone using Turbo Linux around. Either Red Hat. For business use we all use Windows here. Techies who really want Linux use Red Hat, or may be Turbo Linux, but Vine Linux (http://vine.flatout.org/), which is a Red Hat based distribution more specialized for Japanese. It uses glibc locale and the error messages or output messages, man pages, are all Japanized. X Server supports TT fonts to display smooth edged Kanji.

    --
    Goura
  • I'll grant, Linux is a Good Thing. I'll grant, it's gaining in popularity. But there is simply no way this is possible, not yet at any rate.

    Consider, first of all, that not counting upgrades TurboLinux, Win98, and MacOS don't even take up 50% of the market in Japan by TurboLinux's own admission. This said, therefore, what are the other OS'es people are buying in Japan, considering that there must be at least six more for it to be mathematically possible for the numbers they gave to be correct (that is, with TurboLinux at the top, Win98 second, and MacOS third with the given numbers)?

    Look, I'm rooting for Linux as much as the next guy. But someone at TurboLinux needs to check their numbers, because something isn't adding up

    But still, I'd love to see the look on Billy's face when he reads that press release...
  • Who gives a rats patoot what "a lot of people in the community" think, this is a marketing story the point is that linux is selling. People will pay money for the software. Which mean Linux has mindshare. And that means trouble for the people that currently make the most money. If you want to be pissy about OSS developers trying to gain mindshare away from Microsoft, you should think about how Microsoft contributed to the way things currently are. The current line is that all is fair in business so I guess it's tough tittie
  • Exactly...

    McIntosh - Macintosh
    AudioNote - AS/400
    Marantz - Unix

    Just kidding :) (Hi-End audio manufacturers left, OSs- right). And Samsung is really a Muzzide of audio industry!

  • First off, this is Japan the land of the software pirates. I read the other day (think on zdnet) that in Asia China pirates 99.8% of the installs. Japans install rates of pirate software was above 60%. So right there it smashes a huge hole in the idea of Linux as the leader in the market. The second fact is that you really need to add the total sales numbers for Win98 together to get a good estimate.

    This number does NOT include the installed OS that comes on a NEW PC. THIS IS THE DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL THAT IS IMPORTANT. Who cares about retail sales in a nation of pirates.

  • Also, they compare the figures for a week that was TL's first week out, vs sales during the same week for other products that have been around for months. Check back with us in November, and tell us what the rates are then.

  • so what do you think is going to happen when the Japanese get up to speed on Linux?

    Lot's of cool Linux compatible gadgets! Not to mention software and japanime and sushi etc...
  • Nobody buys Win98. People just pirate it. So, one could commission a study to find out the ratio of illegaly obtained copies of Win* to the legally downloaded copies of *Linux... :)

    The Japanese being more technologically-savvy as a whole, it's not surprising that they're embracing Linux and other alternative OS-es more so than North America.

  • Hrm? (Score:2)

    by Bud^- ( 70689 )
    Doesn't Japan use any other unicies commerical or other wise, (solaris, sunOS, AIX, IRIX, freeBSD, openBSD, netBSD, etc. etc.)or NT, any OS run on their mainframes (if they got em) or palmtops?

    Why doesn't Japan start active research/development on OS techs? They could actively strengthen linux in any way they see fit, does japan have an OS that they can all their own?

    I don't think this article is completely true, there is some grey areas, but neither less Turbo Linux has taken a LARGE chunk of the OS market in japan, and my hat is off to them in all due respect for showing a strong presents in japan.

    ~25% of the market share, that is more than ALL distrubation have in the United States, right?

    Also I heard the Korea Goverment was actively developmenting/funding Linux Research and Develpment, I have looked for articles on this to dis/proven this rumor, but atlast I can't read Korean :(
  • I'm willing to bet that the breakdown in japan goes something like this:

    Retail Outlets:
    Win98 30%
    MacOS 10%
    Linux 28%

    InternetDownloads:
    Linux 80%
    *BSD 18%

    PreInstalled versions
    Win9x 80%
    WinNT 7%
    MacOS 11%
    Linux/*Nix/BEOS/CPM/etc ... 2%

    Pirated Software
    Win9x 90%
    WinNT 5%
    Proprietary *Nix 2%
    NetWare 3%

    So now we have 4 banks of equally valid statistics (well not really, since the online, fact. install and piracy stats are best guesses) The neato thing is that we can look at the pirated software category and say that MS is kicking butt. Linux has 0% market share. That means it's not desirable (actually it means it's free) We can look at the online downloads and see that MS market share is effectively zero since only a few warez d00dz are downloading it. We can look at factory installs and assume that MS has a healthy lead and that competition is limited. None of these stats is false, but none of them gives a true representation of software usage patterns in Japan. I personally have no idea what % of OS's in Japan are sold via retail channels. This stat suggests that given an array of competing products lined up on a shelf the Japanese tend to buy Linux at the same rate as Win98. What it does not suggest is that MS market share in Japan is endangered. It might be, but we can't tell this by looking at a highly specific branch of the OS trade.
    --Shoeboy
  • starting from 0, up to 3, back down to 1
  • yeah, i hate it when people waste bandwidth...
  • I think I jumped on this a bit too fast. I think you are right, that press release is very normal and it does go into detail explaining that the total of Windows 98 was still larger then TurboLinux...

    I think since most of us (geeks) don't actually read press releases all that often, and we jump on little details that are quite normal in the marketing/press release sense...

    As I said, wish you the best... The only random comment about TurboLinux (w/out ever trying it): there seems to be a large number of different version numbers for different languages.. It seems like you develop one version and then take some time to "translate" it... At least that's what it looked like to me...

    /Simon

  • Personaly, I still think the correct name for it is Apple Macintosh System Software, as it used to called. True that was freaking hard to write out all of the time, sounds so 1983, and clone unfriendly, but still it's better then MacOS.

    Finally, I prefer MacOS over Mac OS. And I like System Software over both of them.

    "Slashdot -- The Place to Flame and be Flamed" --from linuxppc.org/links.html

    Thanks,

    Andrew B. Arthur aka AArthur
    arthur99@global2000.net
    AIM: Arthur998
  • Doesn't Japan use any other unicies commerical or other wise, (solaris, sunOS, AIX, IRIX, freeBSD, openBSD, netBSD, etc. etc.)

    Yes to all of the above. I've had both a Japanized Solaris box and a Japanized DEC OSF box on my desk.
    Why doesn't Japan start active research/development on OS techs?

    What makes you think they haven't? Just asking.
    does japan have an OS that they can all their own?

    Several that I've heard of, but haven't seen. The most famous one was Sony NEWS, but I don't believe that's supported any more.

    I have TurboLinux running on my laptop. It's a nice system except for the RedHat braindamage (Japanized RedHat ships a .emacs that breaks XEmacs).
  • I would have agreed with that comment more a year or two ago. At this point Linux *is* usable by non-techies, esp. if the install process sets up KDE or GNOME with a rich set of defaults and GUI tools.
  • So, what does a marketing engineer do then?
  • And remember these figures are 'sales,' and do not include copies for friends (I looked at COPYING under their ftp directory and there was the GPL in its full glory.) I suppose OS usage statistics can be made from browser logs with the .jp domain.

    If those are sales and copying is encouraged, I would dare say Linux is the dominant OS in Japan. Either that, or there are lots of pirated copies of Win98 and associated viruses.
  • Someone kicked it back down to 1... Its like a yo-yo! up-down-up-down...

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