Some days ago I had a conversation with the other Hebig on a certain piece of software I will talk about later. While he raves about it, I think it is nice, but of little use to me, as it does not run in Mozilla Firebird. Heiko: "It does not have to, 98% use Internet Explorer."
If you look at logs of MSDN or .NET developer sites, this might be right. If you look at mozilla.org or mozillazine, it probably is not. Now Germany's most visited news-site SPIEGEL online released some figures on browser market shares on that site; and as everyone visits it, that are the numbers to look at if you want to know about what people use in Germany:
"Spätestens mit der Veröffentlichung von Mozilla 1.4 und Netscape 7 kam es zu einem kleinen Boom der Alternativ-Browser: Sie halten nun wieder einen Anteil von 15,1 Prozent. [...] Microsofts Internet Explorer [hatte] Mitte August 2003 ein Gewicht von 83,8 Prozent."
So in mid-August, Gecko browsers held a surprising 15,1% market share, while the Explorer share went down to 83,8%, calulated from a 125 million lines logfile sample.
People are smart. If they come across better tools for their tasks, they switch. Joe Simple probably won't. But far more than the 1% uber-geeks did or do. Among my fellow non-geek students, many switched to Mozilla, not because I preached, but because they simply saw me using it (keyword feature set), and others followed them.
Switching operating systems will be a larger step than switching tools and applications, but again, more than the 1% uber-geeks switched or will switch. Perhaps you or I will, too. But it is clear what I do today when I select new applications or things that run in a web browser or use a web browser as the output chanel: I prefer sofware that runs cross-browser/cross-platform, has open sources and supports standardized file formats. I avoid software that locks me in. So a tool that requires me to use Internet Explorer because "most people have it" is a tool I don't use. Remove the lock-in, and I might reconsider it.
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