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look what they did with the XBox, Web Servers, and Browser. Microsoft always tends to start slow with a crappy product and take heavy losses.

Your examples don't support your thesis:

1. XBox: Microsoft is pouring tons of money into the XBox just to sustain a distant second place status to Sony's Playstation franchise (look at the marketshare numbers here and you can see that PS2 maintains a commanding lead over both the original XBox and the new XBox 360). That's starting slow and staying slow.
2. IIS: According to Netcraft IIS is a distant second in the web-server market. I don't know what kind of money MS is wasting on that fight, but it doesn't seem to be doing them much good.
3. IE: Internet Explorer didn't start slow: it established an immediate foothold upon release and then rapidly ate up marketshare from IE over the course of about two years, almost all based on it's inclusion in the basic Windows operating system distribution.

So we have two products that started slow and stayed slow, and one that started fast and swept the field. Where is the example that started slow and swept the field? I'm not saying that such an example doesn't exist, only that you haven't provided it. I will say that, if such an example exists, it isn't from recent history (last 10 years or so), so the Microsft that was able to carry off the start-slow takeover is not the same Microsoft that we are dealing with today.

There is no reason to expect Zune to fare differently than either the XBox or IIS, unless Microsoft gives one away with every copy of Windows bundled with a new computer. Even then, there is no way to ensure that the free Zunes will actually be used: unlike IE, the Zune is of no use by itself (at least IE could display anybody's HTML webpage, not just MS-HTML(TM) webpages served by MS-IIS, though they have tried) and there is no way to force people to buy the Zune music even if they have a free Zune.

Worse, unless the Zune can rapidly take marketshare from both Apple and Microsoft's former allies in the PlaysForSure and Rhapsody coalitions, it won't get any of the network effects that it needs: music publishers will drift away from the music store and third-party add-on makers won't invest in Zune accessories.

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS, Best Buy is running Apache on Linux via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One via Akami, we can conclude that Comp USA's tech is half-assed, and Best Buy and Circuit City's techs may be half-assed, but Circuit City is helped by being less popular.

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS, Best Buy is running Apache on Linux via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One via Akami, we can conclude that Comp USA's tech is half-assed, and Best Buy and Circuit City's techs may be half-assed, but Circuit City is helped by being less popular.

Based on the fact CompUSA is running on IIS, Best Buy is running Apache on Linux via Akamai and Circuit City is running SUN One via Akami, we can conclude that Comp USA's tech is half-assed, and Best Buy and Circuit City's techs may be half-assed, but Circuit City is helped by being less popular.

Mandrake was another distro that lost touch with its community (not to mention its original developers). Reminds me of another distro! I wonder if their fates will be similar.

This isn't a troll now, mind you ... just a concern. SUSE's a great distro technically, but it seems that the Linux OSS community is gravitating more and more around Fedora (+ Red Hat & CentOS) and Debian (+ Ubuntu) distros these days ....

"Over 90 percent of the Linux server market now belongs to those two companies and the industry has consolidated around those two leaders,' he added."

Phishers have been known to use frame injections to insert their content into framesets, allowing them to grab login info from within the bank's own web site. It's not nearly as fancy as an SQL injection, but it's sure malicious and quite difficult for victims to recognize.Quite difficult for victims to recognize, but easier for the bank to spot in their logfiles (... and fix, before the fraudsters can make much money from it)

Phishers have been known to use frame injections to insert their content into framesets, allowing them to grab login info from within the bank's own web site. It's not nearly as fancy as an SQL injection, but it's sure malicious and quite difficult for victims to recognize.

Back in 2005 Firefox briefly disabled its support for IDN after The Shmoo Group demonstrated the ease of using Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) to spoof existing domains, including those for major retailers or banks. At the time, Mozilla said domain registrars were ignoring ICANN guidelines on IDN, and developed a list of problematic Unicode characters that could be banned in domain names to limit homographic attacks. Not sure if this is still current.

So it seems that the new minister has a project to work on! The web site for his ministry serves up PHP, and according to Netcraft, their web server is running Apache on Linux.

<tongue-in-cheek>The ministry's site seems to be serving up content pretty well, though... Maybe it can limp along with open source.</tongue-in-cheek>

However, it is interesting to note that it was running Linux about a month ago [netcraft.com].

Just a minute. It says it's running Microsoft IIS on Linux. AFAIK, that's not possible.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 8641
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.mict.go.th/index.html
ETag: "4a7c5a4cef2c71:331"
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:35:20 GMT

However, it is interesting to note that it was running Linux about a month ago.

If open source server software, such as Linux, cannot compete with Microsoft's marketing budget, why does Apache continue to hold its substantial majority in the webserver market?

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surve y.html

If open source software could compete, why has Apache's market share been steadily losing ground since Windows Server 2003 was released? If you follow the current trends, in a little under two years Microsoft will have the lead.

Work in software development trying to direct sell an enterprise product for one week, and it will be impossible not to see where things are headed.

I'm a linux kernel developer by trade. I write for an embedded product that runs on linux. I've been doing this kind of stuff for 10 years. Back then hardly anybody doing enterprise stuff (Greater than 200 servers, fibre channel SAN, etc...) would even mention windows. Now you don't get in the door unless your product supports Server 2003. RedHat, and most of the development community has their head in the sand.

None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.

According to Netcraft they run their website on Red Hat servers. They moved from FreeBSD to Linux in September 2005. This might just be a hosting company change, but the fact the netblock is registed to them makes me think that they might run the servers themselves.

Seems a bit strange to me.

Tom.

Date first seen December 1996 -> http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.utube.com

CC.

The Paypal.com web site stayed online throughout, even though the blast happened near its network operations center.

According to a Netcraft report, 3,659 "look-alike" domains (names designed to confuse the recipient into believing they belonged to the bank) were used in phishing attacks in 2005. A lot of these used visual tricks (substituting the number 1 for the letter l, for example) to present a plausible URL. Anti-phishing services are getting better at blocking these sites, but they continue to feature in a large number of scams.

Bullshit, I hear this load of FUD a lot. Show me some numbers.

Everything I've ever read and personally experienced says that popular or not, Linux and its applications are, generally speaking, much harder to crack and exploit, and when they are, patches are rolled out almost instantaneously. Impossible to crack? No. But Microsoft's software (Windows, IE, IIS, etc.) is notoriously full of holes to the point of people just giving up and thinking that having adware and viruses on their systems is normal.

In the meantime, chew on this empirical observation. Microsoft's IIS isn't the market leader in web servers, Apache is. Yet for some weird reason, I constantly hear about IIS compromises and hardly ever see anything about Apache exploits.

Also, chew on this nugget of obviousness. When a security hole is found in an open-source OS or application, typically it's easy to find because the source code is right there for everyone to see. When a security hole is found in a closed-source OS or application, there's a pretty good chance that you'll never know as malicious hackers and crackers quietly go about exploiting it on your systems. Even if it's revealed, you're completely at the mercy of the developer, who may not even acknowledge that the hole exists as the world burns down, and who may or may not be inclined enough to rate it as a priority to fix.

If Linux was the most popular OS, we would be blaming it today for botnets and uncontrollable zombies.

Fine, keep encouraging people to use that other quaint little OS that we know is rife with vulnerabilities, and compounding the problems with exploits out there, and rationalizing it by saying that maybe things would be just as bad in a Linux world. As for me, I'll take my chances and try to get everyone I can to use Linux, and encourage OSS developers to continue making their software as user-friendly as possible.

Phishing sites with SSL certs

In-depth look at one SSL phishing attack

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=http%3A%2 F%2Fnews.netcraft.com%2F

Only 6 users? I think Debian has a bit more users than that.

In "2006 Desktop Linux Survey" by desktoplinux.com Debian was the second most popular distro with 12.2 % of all the votes. Ubuntu won that poll with 29.2 %.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey. cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613

DistroWatch statistics show that 32.2 % of their visitors use Linux. 7.7 % of their visitors use some version of Ubuntu (or their derivatives) and 4.3 % of their visitors use Debian or its derivatives (excluding Ubuntu and its derivatives, which actually are also Debian's derivatives). So Ubuntu's percentage of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors is over 20 % and well over 10 % of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors use Debian. That must be more than 6 users. :-)

http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch .com.osdetail.html

Of course, Debian is mainly used on servers and less on desktops. However, Debian testing/unstable works quite nicely as an up-to-date desktop system. (Ubuntu is a popular desktop distro but it has yet to establish its position as a server distro.)

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedor a_makes_rapid_progress.html

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/stron g_growth_for_debian.html

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=205

Only 6 users? I think Debian has a bit more users than that.

In "2006 Desktop Linux Survey" by desktoplinux.com Debian was the second most popular distro with 12.2 % of all the votes. Ubuntu won that poll with 29.2 %.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey. cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613

DistroWatch statistics show that 32.2 % of their visitors use Linux. 7.7 % of their visitors use some version of Ubuntu (or their derivatives) and 4.3 % of their visitors use Debian or its derivatives (excluding Ubuntu and its derivatives, which actually are also Debian's derivatives). So Ubuntu's percentage of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors is over 20 % and well over 10 % of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors use Debian. That must be more than 6 users. :-)

http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch .com.osdetail.html

Of course, Debian is mainly used on servers and less on desktops. However, Debian testing/unstable works quite nicely as an up-to-date desktop system. (Ubuntu is a popular desktop distro but it has yet to establish its position as a server distro.)

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedor a_makes_rapid_progress.html

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/stron g_growth_for_debian.html

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=205

did Linux sell 7 million copies? I don't think so.

Funny though, cause according to Netcraft IIS has been making solid gains since January. You will notice the GP says "continues to grow", as in a "rate of change" which is true according to Netcraft. You lied and said "Apache has twice the market share of IIS" which is barely true (won't be in a few months if the trends continue) but you ignored the valid point of the grandparent post. Fanboi.

Fact is Microsoft is the big gorilla in the OS business.

And they haven't declined yet. Will Vista be the turning point? I don't know. But Windows is still **the** dominant OS. They are very relevant.

Bullshit.

Look at Netcraft's front page. You'll find a list of hosting providers - people with lots of powerful machines connected to very fat pipes, just what an attacker most wants to 0wn. Look at what they're running.

Look at Netcraft's Web Server Survey. Over 60% of the Web is served by Apache web servers - the vast majority running Linux.
There's no shortage of targets - they're just much harder to compromise.

Bullshit.

Look at Netcraft's front page. You'll find a list of hosting providers - people with lots of powerful machines connected to very fat pipes, just what an attacker most wants to 0wn. Look at what they're running.

Look at Netcraft's Web Server Survey. Over 60% of the Web is served by Apache web servers - the vast majority running Linux.
There's no shortage of targets - they're just much harder to compromise.

"Well...I can guarantee that if you put a Linux or OS X box on the Internet that it would be attacked by exactly the same things. What's the point of this again?"

The point is thet the Internet is infested with compromised Windows boxen. Ok, where are all the compromized Linux web servers. Assuming they are running Apache under Linux. According to Netcraft Apache usage is at roughly 980,00,000 while IIS is at 490,00,000. Why don't we see an equivalent number of compromised Linux servers.

Yet another mod troll .. Doh

was Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)

Maybe it's you who should check NetCraft. www.army.mil uses Mac OS X/WebStar: netcraft

Looks like Windows 2003 servers at the Department of Commerce.

"doesn't mean the hacked server wasn't using Windows, but there's also a good chance it was running Linux", xswl0931

It's not a server but hundreds of workstations. What OS do you think they are running on the desktop.

"Hundreds of computers must be replaced to cleanse the agency of malicious code, including rootkits and spyware."

"had identified several successful attempts to attack unattended BIS workstations during the overnight hours."

"The official also confirmed that BIS has limited Internet access to stand-alone workstations that are not connected to the bureau's internal network."

http://www.bis.doc.gov/ was running Microsoft-IIS on Windows 2000 when last queried at 7-Oct-2006 02:01:33 GMT

was Re:What OS? Looks like Linux

Nice job linking to extremely old article. Before you go spouting off facts, you could check netcraft.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=goarmy.co m

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.us.ar my.mil

Been running on Solaris for years. I'm sure your buddy Steve is happy your still drinking the kool-aid.

Nice job linking to extremely old article. Before you go spouting off facts, you could check netcraft.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=goarmy.co m

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.us.ar my.mil

Been running on Solaris for years. I'm sure your buddy Steve is happy your still drinking the kool-aid.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/ Netcraft installs a tool bar on your browser that shows host information (including country) and the level of trustworthiness. Users can submit phishing links through a link on the bar. I use it mostly to spot the hosts of spammers, but it also raises useful questions such as a link from eBay with a web hosting service in Korea. They've recently become particular about what kind of URLs they consider phishing. For example I wouldn't consider a mortgage spammer hosted in China to be a serious candidate when it's time to re-fi the family manse. They also don't consider possibly illegal content (child porn for example) to be phishing.

Nothing to see here, move along.

"It's worth noting that Netcraft's anti-phishing toolbar detected this site as malicious and tried to prevent me from visiting it, as it is designed to do. I have to say that I've visited countless phishing sites in the past few months, and Netcraft's toolbar has done its job almost unfailingly."

toolbar.netcraft.com

From Netcraft's site report:

Netblock owner: Chinese Economic News Services

Careful who you're listening to!

This weakness was first described at the CRYPTO conference in August, and a technical explanation of the exploit was public on Aug. 27, Open SSL issued its advisory and patch on Sept. 5 and the Netcraft article cited by ZDNet has been online since Sept. 7. So while this is a potentially problematic security issue, it's not brand new, has been patched by OpenSSL and quite a few vendors have issued patches as well.

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.163.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sina.com.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.sohu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.netbig.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.baidu.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.chinadaily.co m.cn
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.263.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.yesky.com
• http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.taobao.com

According to Netcraft, Apache has lost significant marketshare to IIS/.NET this year:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/09/05/septe mber_2006_web_server_survey.html

No, that makes sense. It's running Linux

Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwhile, given the rapid rise and fall of services, do you really trust a given service to be there tomorrow? Google's not going anywhere, but is UberWebSpreadsheet3000 going to be there tomorrow? Anyone who thinks major service providers don't have outages should check Netcraft's coverage. If MySpace and Wikipedia, can be taken out by a power outage, so can lots of mid-size providers. If for-pay companies like Final Fantasy XI's game servers, online payment site StormPay, or domain registrar Joker's DNS servers can be taken down by DDOS, so can lots of other online businesses for which people pay for reliable access.

A bit of mistrust in online services, especially if you rely on that service, seems like the prudent thing to do.

Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwhile, given the rapid rise and fall of services, do you really trust a given service to be there tomorrow? Google's not going anywhere, but is UberWebSpreadsheet3000 going to be there tomorrow? Anyone who thinks major service providers don't have outages should check Netcraft's coverage. If MySpace and Wikipedia, can be taken out by a power outage, so can lots of mid-size providers. If for-pay companies like Final Fantasy XI's game servers, online payment site StormPay, or domain registrar Joker's DNS servers can be taken down by DDOS, so can lots of other online businesses for which people pay for reliable access.

A bit of mistrust in online services, especially if you rely on that service, seems like the prudent thing to do.