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Ellison: Linux Will Soon Decimate MS Windows
cioxx writes "Speaking to a few-hundred ISVs at an Oracle-sponsored event in New York, Larry Ellison made a bold prediction , also covered in Infoworld, stating: "(Microsoft has) already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance [...]", referring to Apache's displacement of MS IIS server. He continues on with a claim that battle for datacenter dominance is looming with a clear advantage on the side of Open-Source platforms, and desktop would follow once Star Office becomes completely "usable" to compete with MS Office. "And it's going to happen to them again on Linux." Newsforge also has a related article on Oracles ongoing linux efforts.
...and she's a marketer.
She does so to get a little street credibility with geeks.
My point? If the marketers are going to software like this to get a marketing edge, then there is a chance Ellison is right.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Decimate means "reduce by 10%".
It does NOT mean:
"Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance"
chrisd, Get a dictionary.
Looking at the figures it doesn't look to me like IIS has gone from market leader to irrelevance. For the last 5 years - since IIS appeared - Apache has maintained a market share roughly twice that of IIS. But both shares have grown.
...Larry Ellison made a bold prediction...
Again? Last time he predicted anything, it was the diskless "network computer", that will decimate traditional pc's. That was supposed to happen around 1997. Now that was a bold prediction. Probably as valuable as this one.
According to the infoworld article and the computerworld article:
not staroffice, as theThe point is that Apache domiantes the server world becuase it comes with all commercial Unix boxes. And large companies are happy that this piece of open source that came bundled with AIX or HPUX or Solaris has some kind of formal support and backing (if the Apache project ever looked like folding, HP/Sun/IBM would keep it going).
Only recently are we seeing the real dominace of Linux in ISPs, and that again is partly becuase of IBM and Sun (Cobalt, etc). So I don't think there is any linkage between the uptake of Apache and the corporate uptake of Open Source in general, either on the server or the client.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
... is the insinuation that Microsoft once 'had' dominance in the webserver sphere. As far as I can remember (and I could be wrong, though I've been on the 'net since before the Web and this is my perception) Apache has *always* been the #1 web server, with IIS only ever coming close to playing catchup.
So it wasn't that MS' dominance was ever 'beaten', its just that they cannot beat the dominant methodology for web servers, which is Open Source.
I think there's a difference between saying 'beaten back' and just 'beaten from the gate'.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
'Decimate' means to reduce by one-tenth. It originates from the punishment for mutiny given to a whole Roman legion: killing every tenth man. So if you think that Windows installations are 10% less than they would have been if Linux didn't exist, then Linux has already decimated Windows, at least on the server.
:-).
It's the remaining 90% that is at stake
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
More information here.
I think that it will be just a matter of time until similar news will come from rest of Asia, Europe and finally USA.
PDF is an archival output form, in many cases as opaque and uneditable as a bitmap. I wouldn't call it a useful format for documents that are 'live' and need to be editable. It isn't even intended for such purposes. As such, it's a horrible choice as an interoperability format for 'Office' documents.
It's great for 'freezing' things to archive them, of course.
Word format isn't even a reliable way to send documents between people who use Word. If they use different versions, or different fonts installed, then the formatting can go wrong, sometimes resulting in serious problems. (Actually, that link refers to use of RTF, but I think Word's RTF files are equivalent to Word's binary files.)
Takes 30 seconds to start up on my machine. Does that count?
Interesting how lots people predict that Apple will be relegated to obsolescence and should shift their business model to software-only (OS X on x86 and the like) and yet people think that MS should be relegated to.. hardware?
IIS had about a good a chance as anyone. Sure, Apache was early to the market, but MS has billions to pour into pushing it. And, frankly, IIS *did* have sizeable marketshare, although nowhere near what it has on the desktop.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
As anyone can clearly see at Netcraft, IIS never even came *close* to beating Apache, let alone did they have a "virtual monopoly". Back in 1997 when Microsoft and Netscape (now SunONE) were struggling for 10% shares, Apache was already at 40% -- and it only went up from there.
" Those are the situations Ellision/Oracle will need to be fearful of. Many many many applications *do not* require the featureset that Oracle provides, and therefore, you will start to see (as has already happened) projects getting picked off by the lowest end databases."
Yes and the result is that Oracle doesn't even attempt to play in the low end anymore.
Oracle will live a lot longer because while weve gotten the OS down and most of the server software the OSS folks aren't even close to high end in the SQL department.
Mysql is pretty sweet for the low end but chokes all over itself once you start putting it under even moderate write load.
PostgreSQL is better under load but lacks needed features such as mirroring.
Took out the low end? yep! But now when you max out the OSS options your so deep into oracle land it's scarey. My last boss almost had a heart attack when he realised he had grown from needeing the free MySQL to $30 000 oracle.
Ellison's prophetic comments, much like Scott McNealy of Sun, are generally worthless: If one looked at his historical claims they would find an astoundingly poor accuracy of their predictions. At some point shouldn't someone call him on his abilities as a seer?
The most ridiculous part of his comments that immediately pointed out how uninformed and idiotic his vitriolic claims are is the statement "They had a virtual monopoly on Web servers, and then they were wiped off the face of the earth. And it's going to happen to them again on Linux.". The Slashdot summary itself points to the Netcraft graph, but strangely fails to points out the absurdity of Ellison's statement: Microsoft has never had a "virtual monopoly" on web servers. Indeed, Microsoft was an underdog, came into the game after Apache, and has grown to 28%, gaining 5% or so during a period when Apache marketshare has remained constant.
P.S. Ellison is going to have to develop a new angle to push Oracle - When SQL Server trounced them in the clustered results on the TPC-C, Ellison and friends proclaimed that clustered results don't count, getting the TPC to allow one to separate clustered and non-clustered. Well now Microsoft beats Oracle at non-clustered results too. I'm sure there'll be some new angle to defend against this.
Please, no more roll your own classes for features that have been part of the language for years, especially collection classes.
And the difference between the above and an apache box which also serves up its content by samba is? Each "site" has a samba share with appropriate permissions and then your apps can edit the content and save it back up. Best thing is no passwords prompts once you are logged in properly.
Actually, you have a wrong question. The correct one is: "What is the difference between the above and an apache box running moddav?"
Dav allows website editing directly with Microsoft Office, and it also allows website editing directly with just about anything. It is actually created for that purpose. And it is a lot easier to set up and use than samba.
It has to work - rfc1925
A combination of slow queries and frequent writes will cause mySQL to die. Totally. It can cause data to take ten minutes to save.
The solution is to rewrite your applications to use only fast queries, but if you really need to do slow queries it's a genuinely serious problem. I had it for a long time, and it drove people nuts. I eventually discovered how to optimize certain queries and the problem went away, but it is real.
Slashdot doesn't have this problem because the queries it uses are rarely complex. You can do "select x,y,x from messages where thread_id = 10445" all day without it breaking a sweat. But try to do something it can't optimize with indexes and it will die.
My problem was using:
select * from cal where left(date, 10) = '2003-01-01'
instead of
select * from cal where date >= '2003-01-01' and date date_sub('2003-01-01', interval 1 day)
The first can't use indexes and the second can.
During these SELECTs, mySQL locks the tables involved, preventing writes from happening. So one slow query on crucial databases can hang the system.
In the end, I found the problem was pretty easy to work around, but it took forever for me to figure out what it was. Watch out for those date fields!
D
Not to pun, but you've hit the nail on the head.
When I need to build a house, I'll use a nail gun. Why? Efficiency.
When I need to hang a picture, I'll use a hammer. Why? Simplicity.
The Oracle pundits would have you believe that you need a nail gun for all nailing purposes. The realists know that you use the right tool for the job at hand. Buy a nail gun when you need it.
I'm migrating the IIS setup to Apache and I see a few differences. With samba shares, it's almost as easy to open a site for editing (\\server\site) but not as intuitive as FrontPage extensions (http://server/site).
Well, FrontPage extensions are available for apache. You can edit the pages using the intuitive http://server/site addresses. So what exactly is your point?
It has to work - rfc1925
I believe Apache 2.0 has a Windows GUI, if you're a GUI kinda guy.
May we never see th