Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

Read more

In October, Windows 7 usage has for the first time surpassed Windows XP usage globally according to statistics from StatCounter. In other words, Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world.

This has been a long time coming. Windows XP has been at the top for eons (it launched 10 years ago, and once established, didn’t let go). Windows Vista never managed to threaten XP, so it wasn’t until Windows 7 came around that a shift really started to happen.

And that shift has happened fast. Windows 7 launched in October of 2009, then…

Read more

Let’s see now. Where to begin? It’s been reported elsewhere that traffic to Google+ has dropped off by as much as 60% when compared to the huge boost the social network got in the days after it went public on September 20 (reportedly a 1,200% traffic boost). The basic problem now is that some are flinging this number around as some kind of proof that Google+ is doomed to fail and can’t retain users. So, time to for a reality check.

First of all, that Google+ would receive a huge but temporary boost around that time was a given. Remember this worldwide Google+ promo that Google ran on all its search pages, including Google.com?

Read more

Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

Read more

Apple earned a massive profit of $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. That beats Google, Microsoft, Intel and a bunch of other big tech companies by quite some margin.

One reason (of several) that profit per employee is such an interesting metric is because it gives you a number that doesn’t depend so much on the size of the company. In other words, it becomes easy to compare companies of different sizes.

We have calculated the yearly profit per employee for a selection of big tech companies that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, Dell.

Read more

Five years ago, Apple was a successful company with the iPod and its Mac line of computers. But it had not yet launched the iPhone. It had not yet launched the iPad. Back then, Apple’s yearly profit was $2.4 billion. In 2010 that number had risen to $16.6 billion. And in the first quarter of 2011, Apple has already made a $6 billion profit, well on its way to eclipsing previous years. It’s become a cash machine.

Apple is riding a wave of continuous success, and the stock market simply loves it. The value of the company has skyrocketed.

That’s the part we will take a closer look at in this article. How well has Apple done compared with other big tech companies in the last five years, i.e. 2011 compared to 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone?

Read more

Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

Read more

We’ve mentioned the tremendous growth of Facebook at numerous occasions on this blog, and it’s fascinating how fast the social network has risen from being an upstart fighting with MySpace to basically leaving the entire social media landscape behind in the dust.

Since Facebook is now so ginormous (that’s the scientific term for it, right?) we wanted to give you a frame of reference for how big the service has become. And as we so often do, we’ve done it with a chart.

Read more

During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of damage to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried about family and friends and wanted information as soon as possible.

Internet connections, however, continued to work for the most part, so people turned to social media instead.

Read more

This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Read more