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Linux Server Sales to Reach $9.1 Billion by 2008
dunric writes "ZDNet is reporting that sales of servers using Linux will reach a whopping $9.1 billion by 2008. Annual revenue for Linux servers is expected to grow by a healthy 22.8 percent, compared to just 3.8 percent for the overall server market. Additionally, Linux servers will account for nearly 26% of all server shipments."
Methinks ZDnet published this prediction simply to exploit the predictable slashdot-effect response to such a story. I am projecting a 22% increase in ad revenues from their banner ads featured with this story at the tail end of 2004.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"A whooping $9.1 billion by 2008", or so it is reported.
But what about the Windoze servers ?
"A whimper $18.2 billion by 2008" ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This raises an interesting point. If pricepoint is genuinely what is the deciding factor for these predictions, what will happen when OpenSolaris is release?
From the article - This is not a troll, but I have never understood the wide-spread embracing of Linux to be a direct result of anything but price-point and community support. I hate near everything about the way Linux is structured when compared to other flavors of UNIX, and I am not a fan of the kernel internals, yet I keep going back to it because of the aforementioned reasons. To be fair, I was introduced to UNIX with SunOS and the BSD family before being introduced to Linux, and lately I've been sharpening my skills with AIX and some of their enterprise solutions, so I may be totally missing the point of Linux.
Let's talk hypothetical here - Let's say Sun releases Solaris under a nice license that satisfies everybody - the BSD nuts, the Stallman-worshipers, and the corporate players [bear with me here; I realize I'm treading fairytale water], and let's say the community loves it and starts hacking away at it like a hillbilly with a hatchet. Right there, the Linux pricepoint and community support is matched.
I predict in the future we will see some more UNIX versions opened up, specifically, AIX. This is based entirely on speculation and the late-night readings of IBM papers, but I wholeheartedly believe in the next 10 years, IBM will either completely open the source or share a great portion of it (barring a SCO victory).
I myself have always preferred commercial UNIX to community efforts (although the *BSDs are near and dear to my heart) and have used Linux out of necessity, not out of direct superiority to commercial UNIX. My point is that if (or when) commercial versions of UNIX (such as Solaris and AIX) match the benefits of Linux, Linux may be the kid without a gimmick. But again, this is based entirely on the premise that Linux's gimmick is limited to the two previously mentioned, so if I am totally missing something, would some more-informed Linux guru clarify
Eh, it's late. Too much RPG IV.
"You and your third dimension."
Don't forget that FreeBSD is stealing in on MS and the other UNIXes as well.
Here, we're winding down Solaris and replacing it with FreeBSD.
(although patch management on BSD is an absolute PITA... portupgrade my ass. Give me Debian anyday)
READY.
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Around 2000, Linux was already reported at over 30% and to rise even more.
How is it possible that it is expected to account for only 26% of shipments in 2008?
Easy: IDC changed their counting methods in the meantime, while the earlier numbers are about shipments, the current numbers are about revenue and only for server-hardware that actually ships with Linux.
That is correct:
So to make a long story short, most Linux server installations do not exist for IDC.
Isn't it funny that Windows always looks good in heavily distorted studies (TCO "studies", market share studies, etc.) while they no longer look so good in not-so easily distorted studies (like Netcraft)?
Of course IDC is quite smart, they talk about "sales" and they know that people will think about shipments/units and not revenue.
While the older numbers had some touch with reality, the current numbers are just nonsense. In reality Linux already accounts for a lot more than IDC wants us to believe.
The parent post is maybe not so far off the mark, though i'd like to posit a slightly different way of looking at things. I believe the situation would be clearer (for once!) if we wrote GNU/Linux instead of Linux.
Linux is just a kernel. Another child post mentioned it has good hardware support compared to solaris, i'm sure there are some other good points (e.g. a lot of architectures supported, embedded apps, a formidable base of experienced open-source developers, etc.,) that could mean Linux wouldn't just die if Solaris became free/Free.
But what most people think of as Linux, and what is in fact the largest part of, GNU/Linux is the set of userland tools we use. From the basics like bash, tar, grep, sed, awk, etc., to the compilers (gcc, etc.,), and up to the desktop level tools (KDE-family, Gnome-family, mozilla, openoffice, and so on).
Many of these tools can/are(!) ALSO be used on Solaris systems as appropriate/preferred.
If the Solaris licence is as free as the parent post hypothesizes, then this future is great! We can have a GNU/Solaris system if we want, Debian could offer a Debian-Solaris option (in the same vein as the Debian-NetBSD port), we can use bits of Solaris to improve Linux... All grist to the Free-Software mill.
Where I work, we all have servers as desktop development machines (typing this on a dual xeon, etc). We get our machines from Dell, and usually default to the Windows XP setup. As soon as we get them we reformat and install RedHat Enterprise or Fedora. I guess that means we arent counted in the stats, but instead are counted in the 'Windows Server' statistics, even though we are all using Linux servers. So I would think the Linux server stats are probably higher than stated.
Businesses tend to be risk adverse, which is generally a good thing. This means also that they are afraid of change. So this slows down Linux quite a bit.
Home users tend to stick with what they use at work. So until Linux takes over on the corporate workstation, it will be a slow tough fight.
All that being said, I think that Linux will kill windows. It will just be a slow process until a certain market share is reached. At this point application compatibility will be less of an issue. But progress is occuring much faster than some people realize: Linux is certainly killing proprietary UNIX (as is Windows), and the fate of OS X is uncertain, though I suspect that it will slowly be open sourced bit by bit, and they may slowly subsume eachother.....
Consider that 5% of the PC's which shipped last year ran Linux (mostly Linspire and Mandrake). Even after you count those where Windows was later installed, that was still up to three percent of *new* PC sales. Yes, Microsoft's monopoly has begun to collapse already. This year, maybe, it will be more.
Linux is already causing Microsoft real headaches in a few very key markets such as internet server and embedded system markets. The real beacheads are business web application development, desktop, and groupware now. But it is a slow process at the moment and will be for some time. I do predict though that it will be a fierce war for the desktop by the time Longhorn ships.
Also, Microsoft's last year of record profits was the year XP was launched. This is to be expected. But their market share is another question-- how do you measure market share? In dollars? If so then the slow demise of proprietary UNIX and Netware gives Microsoft greatly inflated numbers. If in deployments, then the simple answer is: we don't really know what real numbers are because we have no good way of measuring them.
Now, is there a tipping point? You bet. At a certain point, people won't write their business web tools for IE only (as Safeco does). Vertically targetted tools will be available for Linux, etc. and all basic productivity tools will be open source. At this point, I expect Linux useage to take off much faster.
However the original statement was that that Linux only cuts into Unix marketshare, which is clearly proven wrong by these stats because there are 2 realistic possibilities:
For both possibilities, the original statement is clearly wrong.
(Yes I do know that Apache runs on Windows, but I also know that it isn't done very often, sorry.)
Oh, I tend to differ. We are mostly a Microsoft company and I had no confidence, in the past, with going to Linux.
But now we are slowly but surely switching many of our servers over. For me, the biggest drive to the new servers comes from the fact that Linux is getting as easy to use as Windows. Have you seen, for example, the MySql Administrator GUI? That with something like Navicat makes it a pure SQL Server killer for web applications. I admit I'm writing on Windows, but the actual server will run on Linux. We plan on moving file servers to Linux as well. These cross platform tools are great for converting people too.
I'm sure PHP and the Eclipse development environment are driving the change as well.
And before you crap on me for being too simple-minded and being focused on this amateur ease of use stuff, we develop software that builds websites. It is built on C#, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript/DHTML, CSS and ties into DNS, SMTP, load balancers, database servers, replication, an image scripting language that we wrote to do PhotoShop style manipulations live (and quickly) and a dozen other technologies.
The point is, that we aren't simplistic and it's not that I want to show off what we are doing all this great work. The point is, as a company, we have the skills to do many things but we really don't care about technology for technology's sake. Who wants to learn all the db management command line stuff when we have to deal with integrating 20 other languages. Using the best simple tools for the job appeals to me. We like the stuff to be as easy to use as possible because we'd rather concentrate on writing software and that is where Linux is stealing the market from Microsoft. The tools are getting to the point where developers can focus on the writing of the software instead of how to use the command line interface to the database.
Sunny
Be my Friend
I think a good portion of the growth of Linux has been due to IBM's very successful push to get users to run Linux on IBM's big iron AS/400 and S/390 machines for large-scale computing needs.
:-)
Mind you, I think that's a good thing because IBM gets to sell and/or lease out a lot more hardware in the long run.