Am I interpreting these Alfresco Results Correctly?

[jsmidt]

According to SearchEnterpriseLinux (http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1299270,00.html):


Alfresco continued to survey users over the course of the year, and by December last year had gathered data from 35,000 respondents. Compared with the first sample, the results were remarkably similar: Ubuntu's market share had increased 1% to 23%, Red Hat's remained flat at 21%, and SUSE's decreased by 1% to 13% or, alternatively, by 4% to 9% depending on whether you include openSUSE in the total SUSE figures.

So, has Ubuntu's enterprise marketshare gone up from 1% to 23% in one year!?

If that's true that would be amazing! :) What are these results saying?

[leftorvo]

it increased by 1%, from 22% to 23%

[jsmidt]

it increased by 1%, from 22% to 23%

Hmm.. I wonder how much cash this is bringing in. I know Red Hat and Novell bring in hundreds of millions each year, mostly from the enterprise sector.

You would think if Ubuntu is now taking 22-23% of the market there would be an enormous cash flow. People in the enterprise often want paid support.

[hongkong24]

Interpretation of statistics is not my thing, but one thing for sure is that alfresco only get the answers based on their visitors. So poeple who vote @alfresco.org are surely looking for alfresco and not for compiz fusion, or YAST, or Fedora installation problems
Looking at the alfresco wiki you can see that there is no suse tutorial to explain in detail howto install alfresco.
On the other side ubuntu as well as centOS (also works for fedora) have pretty good tutorial (even they do not really work completely)
Further you can see in the forum that a lot of people try ubuntu just because of the tutorial.
Taking the assumptions into account the statistic does not say anything. Maybe you can say that a lot of people trying out ubuntu because they want to install alfresco but that's it.
Let's say IBM would make such a survey in the blade server forum. Then guess what? SUSE will have at least 50% market share. That's because you get IBM Blade server installed with suse enterprise including support in a package. So admins who already use SUSE and looking for a Blade server system will surely go their and then also vote for the distro they use.
So... if you wanna find out how big is the market share of ubuntu look here http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/07/12/slight_linux_market_share_loss_for_red_hat.html
So what you can say is that 23% of those 35.000 Alfresco users take ubuntu as distro. Looking at the forums you can also assume that most of them are not commercial, meaning no big millions, but a lot of work.
Also you can say that somehow the support of suse users for alfresco is not really great. Or maybe suse users are not that kind of person who like to vote.?
I dunno... but for sure one thing you can believe, Ubuntu's market share is not 23%.