[ Thanks to renai43
for this link. ]
“In it’s Server Operating Environments Market Forecast and
Analysis, 2000-2004 report International Data Corporation predicts
that server software shipments will grow at a healthy 17% annually
over the next four years but that revenues will remain flat –
showing an annual compound growth of just 1%.”
“IDC says the reason for the disparity between unit growth and
revenue grow is due to a number of factors. The market is still
moving away from a model where servers come with expensive
proprietary operating systems linked to hardware manufacturers.
Commodity operating systems such as Windows 2000 and Linux are
replacing these. In the case of Windows 2000 many of the shipments
are not new sales but upgrades – which greatly diminishes
revenue.“
“…To get a clearer local picture of the server OS market, IDC
Australia went to the users and asked them to nominate their three
most business critical operating environments. Of the total
responses Linux scored 9.1% compared with 38.6% for Windows NT.
This confirms the open source operating system’s number two
position. By way of comparison, IBM’s S/390 mainframe environment
scored just 3.2%.”