Who Do You Trust?

One of the truisms I grew up with was “Figures don’t lie, but any liar can figure”. Over the years, I have found it was applicable in many areas of life, and now I am finding that, more than ever before, it works well in the area of claims for use by software authors.

With the alpha of Opera 10 available, I saw, on ZDNet, statistics of Opera use at below 1%, while Internet Explorer is supposedly down to less than 70%. I find both of these figures hard to take.

These figures have the same fishy smell that the Vista adoption rates claimed by Microsoft have. Microsoft admittedly uses quantities shipped, and not registered, as the criteria here – this tends to skew more with each copy of Vista replaced by Dell, with each copy removed by the cottage businesses that have sprung up for this purpose, and those copies simply waiting in the large (i.e. Ingram Micro) warehouses to be sold.

This leads me to ask, like no other time, who can I trust? If asked on ZDNet, many more people respond as Linux users than other sites show, and Firefox seems to be the only browser in use there – Internet Explorer is simply only found on those machines just delivered in the past 24 hours; the very first item on the things-to-do list is download Firefox and make it the default browser. Now that Intel has the top performing chips, every respondent owns a Core2Duo, at the very least. There seems to have been overnight visits by the CPU fairy, transforming all that AMD silicon into much more pleasing Intel goodness (until the next time AMD has the upper hand!)

Every organization has their own bias, sometimes financially motivated, sometimes simply on ideological points, but the bias is there, nonetheless.

So… what do you use? Are you afraid to be in the minority of users responding? And – who do you trust?

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Nothing is illegal if one hundred well-placed business men decide to do it.Andrew Young