At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, Hungary, Mark Shuttleworth — Ubuntu’s founder — just delivered a killer keynote that outlined Canonical’s outrageous goal of reaching 200 million users in the next four years.

To put that figure into perspective, Ubuntu had 8 million users in 2008, and around 12 million users in April 2010 — and those are combined totals, factoring in both desktop and server installations of Ubuntu. Canonical has not released updated figures since then, but estimates put the total number of Ubuntu installations between 15 and 18 million. Those numbers, incidentally, are derived from unique IP addresses that “ping” the Ubuntu update servers; they don’t take into account any offline installs of Ubuntu.

There’s no doubt that Ubuntu is growing — and fairly rapidly, too — but when you factor in the overall growth of the PC market, those figures don’t look anywhere near as impressive; in fact, they look like an operating system that’s treading water and struggling to keep its head above the rushing and turbulent waters caused by the mass adoption of Windows 7. Desktop Linux has always struggled to obtain more than 1% of the operating system market share, and with more and more consumer dollars being spent on smartphones and tablets, and the slow demise of desktop computing, Ubuntu’s goal of 200 million users seems rather farfetched.

The alternative, of course, is that Shuttleworth and Canonical know something that we don’t. If Ubuntu has experienced prodigious growth in the last 12 months to around 25 million users — more than double what it had in 2010 — then 200 million users by 2015 isn’t such a long shot. Furthermore, with Ubuntu 11.10’s inclusion of Qt, the cross-platform application framework used by Nokia’s smartphones, and the continued development of the touch-friendly Unity interface, it’s also possible that Ubuntu has grand designs for a tablet or smartphone version of its OS.

As it stands today, the western PC market is all but saturated, and the only way to get Ubuntu into the hands of devout Windows and OS X users would be to bundle it with new Dell, HP, and Acer PCs. The likelihood of OEMs forsaking Windows, which is used by 90% of the internet’s 2 billion users, is minuscle. The odds of a mass migration from OS X to Ubuntu are slim to none. The Asian and African markets are both developing nicely, however — and let’s not forget that while the PC market might be saturated, everyone and their mother is buying smartphones and tablets.

Realistically, the only way Ubuntu will reach 200 million users by 2015 is if it takes Asia by storm, or if it has a monumentally epic magic trick — like a smartphone OS — up its sleeve.

via OMG! Ubuntu!