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Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS
Ivan writes "
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.""
What about server hardware sold without an operating system?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Okay - but are they equal in sale price?
What weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers? They both weigh the same but you do end up with a lot more feathers.
I meta-moderate because I care.
I have not RTFA, but I would guess the reason MS beat Unix is because Linux is picking up. I'm curious how much of this is real 'gain' for MS, vs Unix 'loss'.
Way to go Microsoft! In the Window's versus Linux war, sales is the comparison you will always win!
Could it possibly be that Unix server sales are down because Unix servers (non-free) are being replaced with Linux servers (free)? How surprising would it then be that the dollar value spent on servers is lower for Unix?
Carpe Daemon
doesnt this really just suggest that windows servers need regular replacing to keep doing their job while old unix hardware keeps doing its job just fine?
TIAEAE!
Maybe Windows servers just got more expensive, or Unix servers got less expensive. Perhaps a better study would talk about volume or usage -- or longevity. Perhaps Unix servers from 2002 simply lasted longer than Windows servers, so the companies using Unix didn't have to upgrade after 3 years.
I guess the cause is probably somewhere in between.
It seems like this study gets published about every two weeks on Slashdot, and everyone has misconceptions about it.
The funny thing is that people's reactions are entirely based on the headline. If Slashdot runs the story as "Linux Server Revenue Up!", half the comments are about Microsoft going out of business or whatever. If they run the larger Windows numbers in the headline, everyone complains.
Anyway -- Here's a laundry list of objections that will no doubt appear:
+ This study doesn't count the servers I have running Gentoo/Debian/etc
-- Most of the revenue reported is actually hardware, so yes it does
+ How would they know what I'm running on my servers? I didn't get a preinstalled OS
-- User surveys, statistical methods, etc. It's not an exact count.
+ My *nix servers have 234 CPUs and run more applications than my Windows servers
-- Because the survey counts $$$ and not CPU or box counts, this sorta works itself out, but I guess this is valid.
+ We put Linux on our i486-33 Servers
-- Who cares? IDC doesn't, they're counting new server revenue.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Folks, don't confuse sales with usage. There's no accurate way to count Linux sales. Even if you count commercial distro sales, it still can't reflect true Linux usage. Take a deep breath and understand what the statistic is saying.
{ Waiting for Microsoft evil empire conspiracy posts... }
Slashdot = alt.religion.windows.mpaa.riaa.sucks
Microsoft's success on the server side was unavoidable for a number of reasons:
.NET platform. They can acquire alot of smart people who will do good work for them.
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
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I buy servers for my company all the time. A proprietry Unix box costs between 6 and 60 times as much as the average Intel box. Whether the Intel box has Windows or Linux makes no difference - we pay for both, and it is an insignificant slice of the cost.
How many Windows boxes where replaced with Linux last year where I work? Answer: None. How many Unix systems where replaced with Linux? Answer: Hundreds.
This is why Windows/Linux eats into HP-UX/AIX/Solaris market share.
The idea here is sales. This does not talk about usage, swithing, or anything else.
So, all of the free downloads and installs are not counted here. Windows had a lot of sales, unix lost some and Linux increased in sales. That's dollars and cents not usage.
With all of the free solaris downloads, linux downloads, and BSD downloads it's no suprise that unix purchases are going down. Why pay for it if you can get it free?
Evolution or ID?
Perhaps a better study would talk about volume or usage -- or longevity.
Why would a market share report, whose audience is investors, want to report on that?
Sure, Unix boxes last longer... plenty of studies have established that... but these people are tracking sales figures.
I work for a small business, and let me tell you - small servers are like the freaking PLAGUE with windows. Every solution vendor wants their OWN server to themselves. I laugh every time I see MS ads talking about consolidation. That's news to me. The most humorous ad I've seen this year was from IBM where this guy is talking about "These generic servers, they keep multiplying... they must have a queen" -- too true.
I've since stopped even trying to fight for "two things on one server". I've just seen them fall over dead too many times because of a crappy application. Simple upgrades become a nightmare when one application needs one thing, and the other wants a different version.
The FreeBSD/Linux boxes on the network do a TON of different things, and only require different boxes if they are in different physical locations, or the application scales past one smaller server. As I've said many times before, MS's biggest friend and worst enemy are all of these crappy software solutions that require Windows.
Look at the numbers. They are *dollar values*. They are not "number of installed servers this year". There's a reason for that.
You know whose lunch Linux has been eating? Solaris's. AIX's. HP/UX's.
You know how much a typical Solaris deployment with commercial servers would have cost? Right. $$$.
You know how much a typical *Linux* server costs? Right. In most cases, nothing. Sure, you can get Red Hat Enterprise and use a commercial Apache replacement and a commercial ssh, but that isn't what most Linux servers I'm aware of are running.
This has been making the dollar size of the market drop like a stone. That says nothing about amount of deployments. That just says that Sun and friends are bringing a lot less money home than they used to, and it's staying with the people who are using the servers.
"Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS"? Hardly. "Windows Bumps Unix as Most Expensive Server OS", perhaps.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
In fact, Windows XP still supports installation on a fat filesystem, so even in the 2005 you can be faced with truncated filenames.
(a) Did you miss the memo? It's 2006 now.
(b) Anybody who installs XP on FAT deserves to be shot. There's been no good reason to use anything but NTFS in Windows since 1999.
(c) FAT supports long filenames anyway. No application written since 1995 is even going to look for truncated filenames.
In fact, if I remember correctly, I think that even when you install XP on a NTFS filesystem, the operative system generates automatically truncated filenames, even if just to preserve compatibility with old msdos apps (which work under a emulated environment in xp, but they still need to be able to use the available files and directories in the filesystem)
So either you don't use microsoft operative systems, or you don't use them beyond of IE and explorer.exe
The only way I can get that statement to make any sense at all is if I assume that you are under the impression that the only programs that exist for Microsoft operating systems are IE, Explorer, and MS-DOS applications.
I personally have been running Win2k since 1999, and the only times I have used truncated filenames in that time have been when I'm ssh'ing in from a Linux box and can't be bothered to figure out how to tweak the quoting so that the Unix shell will cope with the spaces in my paths.