Tim O’Reilly is exposing his market research – this is sort of the sequel of a great talk Tim gave at Foo camp where his team crunched through O’Reilly book sales to try and work out new trends.
As ever, I missed the beginning. We join Mr O’Reilly as he is asserting very carefully that they have no idea what the correlation of these stats are with actual sales, then pointing out that MySql just overtook Oracle. The stats themselves is careful picking over of U.S. book sales from BookScan (not just O’Reilly). What follows is hand-wavey notes with me scrabbling to take notes, but the actual graphs Tim says will be made available publically soon.
.NET books just past Java last quarter of 2003.
Technology Supplier Market Share: Microsoft at 35%, all of open source at around 20%.
Programming language market share: 70% open source (including Java), 30% is proprietary (Visual BASIC, etc).
Version trend information — Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash: sort of bell-shaped, new versions spike and then slowly decline, total zig-zaggy but basically constant. With Red Hat Linux, though, after Fedora, RH books sales collapsed. Might RH have made a bad decision? Total market went down pretty quickly.
Macintosh has 3% market share? Not in books – Mac books sell 25% of all computer books. (Linux 17%, Windows 55%).
TIm’s now showing a bunch of tree maps which aren’t really easy to describe. But that’s okay, because you can play with them yourself.
Question from audience: is there any geographical patterning? This is just U.S. sales, although they have U.K. data. Wanted to sort by geography, but didn’t have time.
Question from audience: will you be publishing your categories, the ontology you’ve deduced. Answer: yeah, we really want to in our copious free time.
Are there any hotspots? Answer: Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York. Best tech shop is in Virginia. Weird, except they’re right next from Langley.