For the last two months, NetMarketShare's initially posted results have shown a significant shift away from Windows, and towards Linux. Both times, NetMarketShare have blinked rather than standing by their own data collection and analysis, and re-weighted those numbers to hew closer to tech reporters' expectations. In both cases, though, their carefully targeted re-weighting has failed to make the shift go away entirely; they've masked the shift, but not eliminated it.
Looking at both the first-reported numbers and the later revised numbers together shows both trends:
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| The truth lies somewhere between these trend lines... but where? |
So, what should we expect this month? More of the same, would be my guess... as you can probably tell from the fact that I'm tracking both 1st-posted and revised numbers, and plotting them against each other. We'll have to see just how big the reported shifts are, both as first reported, and then after NetMarketShare cave to the pressure and massage as much of the shift as possible out of their reported statistics.