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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.""
do you think it will last? Is Windows picking up momentum or is Unix losing momentum?
This probably reflects the massive number of smaller servers that are out there, which often have Windows installed. In our organization, Windows servers tend to have a single application on them (typically by request of the vendor), while our Unix and AS/400 servers tend to have dozens of applications on them.
The irony is that Windows applications often "don't play well together", making it almost a requirement that they get a dedicated piece of hardware. As a reward for this problem, their rankings are boosted.
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'.
Sometimes you want to patch, reboot and repeat. Stability is so *boring*.
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!
From TFA:
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
"Sales" being the operative word. How would one fit the free Linux options into this equation, I wonder?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Pretty silly to count Unix and Linux separately.
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
Linux is third, so it must just be real Unix variants.
The numbers - they make me sleepy...
:D
But note that the article mentions the growth of both Linux _and_ Windows. This is really about the ongoing decline of pure UNIX mainfarmes - something we've all been aware of for years.
The fact that Windows OS now outnumbers UNIX boxes is neither suprising nor noteworthy. They've been chipping away at the server market for ages. Bound to happen eventually.
But what I would be more interested in is out of all these switchers, what's the ratio that switch to Linux compared to Windows? Linux growth is faster (Upgrades along the Windows path don't count, we're talking complete platform migration) I believe. But naturally the title of the article gives enough bias to encourage readers to miss that little tidbit. Or maybe using the phrase "Windows beats Unix" is the journalistic equivalent of shouting "Fire!" when it comes to grabbbing attention...
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
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.
We purchased five brand new Dell rackmountable servers last month. When we got them, we burned in some linux and threw the windows disks in the trash...
Seeing as Dell doesn't force you to buy an operating system with their servers, why did you bother buying them in the first place?
Slight marketshare loss for Unix, large marketshare growth for Linux, with Windows edging out Unix minus Linux.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
A number of dinosaurs is being surrounded with a lot of mammals...
Pretty silly to count Unix and Linux separately.
No, it isn't; it would be silly to lump them together.
TFA was about sales. There are commercial Unix variants that cost money; Linux by itself does not. (There may be costs, e.g. when the Linux vendor includes N months of support, but this is not the same as paying for the OS.) Lumping 'non-free' and 'free' [as in beer] together would be like putting two dissimilar things in the same category.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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
Maybe its because Sun is giving away servers. For free. No cost. And each free server would add ... let me think ... ummm ... zero dollars to the total.8 /
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/2005121
Maybe not.
do you think it will last? Is Windows picking up momentum or is Unix losing momentum?
Or is it simply that Linux is chewing into UNIX market share? They way that headline sounds one might think this is a case of pure market share gain for Microsoft at the expense of UNIX which is probably not the case here.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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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Can you get an MSDN licence that makes it legal to install the OS's supplied on production systems?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Doesn't this help the EU Competition Authority to argue that Microsoft is actively extending their monopoly on desktops into the server market? Does it therefore also suggest that for once a "government" is acting on something in time, saving a market from an extending monopoly before the monopoly covers the second market? It doesn't do anything to make Microsoft comply with court orders though.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Upon hearing the news, Steve Ballmer was happy to hear that his long-thought-out plan to Fucking Kill(TM) UNIX was well underway. When he asked what was next, his advisers told him he'd have to wait, as the database of things to Fucking Kill(TM) had grown too large for Windows to handle so it had to be converted to a UNIX box.
Steve Ballmer is now in the process of Fucking Kill(TM)ing his entire staff.
Maybe spottedkangeroo is a shopaholic.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
By installing Windows, IT managers and execs need only the 800-number lifeline versus paying a IT professional to manage an open source-based system. I have seen too many times a Unix system replaced with x86s running Wintel and employees shown the door immediately afterwards. Canning people does wonders for taxes, social security matching, paying into insurance plans, etc. Microsoft says people are not a good investment.
When it came time to look into getting more UNIX based servers at work we took a new path over RedHat/AIX/SCO and settled on GNU Debian Linux. We are now running three new servers (in the 2005 year) using UNIX(-like) on top of our existing UNIX/Windows setup.
So really sales figures can no longer really be an indicator of what is really out there now that businesses are happy to buy blank servers and load their favourite Linux/BSD distro...unless many corporation's are running pirated versions of Windows on their servers. Which I for one would seriously doubt.
I ate your fish.
It is incredibly difficult to produce a "market" leader measure without some consideration to the way that the market is measured. Fundamentally, that method determines the leader. Consider the obvious:
The market measure should be considered a dubious statistic, much like a political one. Raising the overall spending on education means nothing. Raising the overall spending per student, that means something. If you raise overall spending per student in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars), now you are really producing an accurate measure. The fact that most people can't understand basic comparisons--read the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos--leads to this fallacy of a measurement.
...tizzyd
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?
It would be pretty stupid to lump UNIX and Linux sales together, given that Linux is not UNIX. As far as I can tell, not a single Linux distribution is certified against the Single UNIX Specification, which any Operating System must be in order to be UNIX.
They share similarities to be sure, but they are not the same and should not be lumped together any more than Windows and Linux should be lumped together.
If you work in a large bureaucracy, it's often a lot easier to order a known item that's been through the process of getting on the approved list than to ask for the cheaper item that hasn't.
If you are right, then msft has a strong TCO argument.
Business is competitive. You can't expect companies to want to pay more than they have to.
"Unix" is just the proprietary, old-school variants -- so HP-UX, Solaris, probably AIX and some other ones I'm forgetting. (Does SGI still sell Irix?) I'm not sure what they do with BSD.
.NET and Terminal Server stuff; building systems that integrate tightly (one might say incestously) with the client's OS and applications. Personally I haven't seen much indication that Windows servers are really cutting into *nix's core markets -- particularly HTTP and email. Others might be able to provide counterexamples, but in general I think this is a pretty positive report altogether for Linux.
Linux isn't counted in there, it's recorded separately. But even recorded separately, and marked only by hardware sales dollars (not the most flattering number to use, for a FREE operating system that runs on almost anything), it comes in third. So if you bought a server that came bundled with a Windows license, but then installed Linux on it, it's counted as a "Windows sale." The only things, I think, that are being counted are actual "Linux servers," like you can buy from Dell or IBM.
So I think the picture this paints is pretty good for free software. Bad for proprietary Unix vendors, but the writing's been on the wall for a while, guys. Hope you cashed out your options when the going was good.
The growth in Windows servers is unfortunate but expected, as more people want to start doing
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That's true. However, effectively Windows Networking is the same (effectively, I said - I know the details are quite different). If a user has full administrative rights on a Windows system that is a full domain member then network file storage as a whole is easily cracked; in fact you can probably easily derive everyone's cleartext passwords by requesting them in a weakly encrypted form and running them through some free software. In every networked file system I know of, if you have unrestricted access to a node that has full membership in the authentication protocol, you have the same ability. Some systems make this harder, by restricting the nodes that have full authentication capabilities (Kerberos comes to mind immediately) but again, if you have root on the Kerberos server or SASL store or whatever, you can get passwords, and if you p0wn a trusted multiuser machine you either exhaustively query the authentication system or stealthily pick up the user authentication converstations as they go by. No. It seems that way if you hang out in "traditional academia" type shops but really NFS is merely popular, not ubiquitous. I have worked in computer science for decades in defense, research, industry, and finance, and most of the places I have worked had a total prohibition on NFS because of the inherent insecurity of the early implementations. I think they are essentially immature, but fundamentally better in basic design. They do not make the assumptions that NFS makes (NFS works best with NIS or LDAP to co-ordinate user IDs, but NIS has horrible design flaws and LDAP is also immature despite fairly strong design). Tridge recommended Coda to me when I asked him about alternatives to NFS and SMB years ago, and I respect his opinion rather highly (we should all probably move to Coda or Andrew so that the implementations can mature!) There are great advantages and small disadvantages to that approach. But you need LDAP to make it really integrate properly, and the samba team will always be facing challenges from Microsoft's evolving use of crypto that will make their product lag slightly behind Microsofts' implementation releases (granted, once the samba stuff catches up it's more robust and scaleable). Because it's less secure than NFSv4 and LDAP, and far less cost-effective than Samba, and less compatible with non-microsoft systems than OpenLDAP or Red Hat directory server. If you have a highly skilled computer staff and relatively unskilled end-users (a situation often found in a profitable corporation) samba and OpenLDAP are a nice combination. Don't try it if your IS group is a bunch of talentless hacks, though!
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.
Why virtualize?
1. VMWare makes backups much easier. Just compress and copy a directory.
2. Disaster recovery. Did your main server just go down with five VMWare guests? No problem, just copy your recent backups (or from the crashed server's hard drive if it still works) to a new server's VMWare installation. No setting up all those apps and OS configurations. The VMWare host is a very simple installation that is easy to recover since no non-default apps other than VMWare are needed.
3. Do more with less hardware. Many companies try not to buy hardware unless it's abolutely necessary. It's great to be able to create a new development or testing server at the drop of a hat without needing new hardware.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I have two economy cars, and one minivan. The minivan cost more than twice what the economy cars cost. For the first time in history, minivan sales have taken the lead over econony car sales in my household!
(sigh)