[ Thanks to SteveOC
for this article. ]
According to Netcraft, their latest Aug 2007 survey shows more
very large gains for Microsoft technologies on the web:
“In the August 2007 survey we received responses from
127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last
month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share,
adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames.
As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%,
while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft’s recent gains raise
the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache’s leadership
position.”
“What does this mean for Apache? Is Apache dying? Is Microsoft
set to take top spot as the web platform of choice?
My take on this is a little out left field; let’s look at the
bigger picture here. What I believe we are seeing here is quite
simple–the old client-server fat desktop model of development is
dying, and everybody wants to get in on web apps.
So, of course, there is a big rush of growth in domain names
(many of them parked), simple brochure-ware sites, and
first-attempts at websites with a mix of content and back-end
code.
Thus it’s no surprise to see the result of millions of former
desktop VB programmers take their first big steps out of the 1980s,
with the result being a big growth in new sites of all types. We
are going to see more and more and more Windows ‘servers’ popping
up on the Net.
You cannot infer from this anything useful in terms of comparing
the functionality of IIS to Apache, or Windows to Unix, or
(insert religious-war flamebait here).
All you can infer is that the web continues to grow, and that
many Microsoft-centric developers are getting on board with web
apps. That’s it in a nutshell.
You can infer from this that web apps have become a mainstream
solution to age-old IT problems and this trend is here to stay.
That’s fantastically good news for anyone who is up to speed with
the tubes of the internets, and who enjoys making their solutions
web-based.
There are no more board room battles needed to convince PHBs
that webifying your projects is a sensible plan of attack.
Microsoft has done a fantastic job of breaking down that particular
barrier. They have also done well for themselves in doing that, but
unwittingly–by having opening up the floodgates–they are helping
to make the old idea of ‘The desktop is the computer’ a thing of
the past. They are helping to push the idea that ‘the web
is the computer,’ which truly opens the field up like never
before.
And so, every new Microsoft server popping up on the web with
some first attempt at a website is a future business opportunity.
All of those sites (even the most spectacularly unsuccessful), will
generate future requirements for bigger and better expansions down
the track. As that happens, the business opportunities for taking
these companies to the next level will be phenomenal.
Like anything remotely complicated, the real winners here are
those rare breed of people with the skills to make it happen. The
creme of the crop of MS developers will do well, but for myself (as
a Linux nut devoted to the web), it is also a good thing. It’s so
much easier to take something already almost-running on IIS and
convert it to my way of doing things, than it is to take a hairball
mess of a VB-, Access-, and Office-based “desktop solution” and
make it work on the web.
I don’t know how many readers here can remember the early 1990s,
but I remember clearly how Microsoft tried every trick in the book
to kill this threat called “the Internet.” It was clear back then
that the Internet would (eventually) spell the end of the road for
a complete Windows stranglehold. Redmond’s replacement vision at
the time (called “The Microsoft Network”) was a non-TCP/IP-based
global SMB network that would rely on RPCs and OLE-2 over netbui.
Thank goodness that never happened!
While Microsoft may conveniently be rewriting history 1984-style
to suit themselves (“We are allied to Eurasia, we have always been
strong allies of Eurasia”), the fact is, they are being extremely
helpful at the moment in supporting the notion of the web as an
application platform. We have been fighting for this
concept for over 15 years now.
I, for one, thoroughly welcome Microsoft to the party, helping
us put a nail in the coffin of the closed and proprietary
desktop operating system paradigm. Every new web-based development,
regardless of how it is hosted, means one less (MS-based) desktop
development.
For me, at least, every new IIS server that steals a fraction of
a percentage point on the latest Netcraft survey broadens my smile
by a fraction of a percentage point. I don’t have any problem with
that. As a member of the Linux faithful, neither should you.
SteveOC
ZDNet: Google Moves the Numbers, Press Panics
“Supposedly the big news coming out of LinuxWorld today is that
Microsoft’s IIS server is ‘catching up’ to Apache.Bunk. Apache’s share is declining because
Google has switched its own servers to its own flavor of
Apache–the Google Front End server–which makes extensive use of
AJAX and server-side Java for faster page loads…”