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Apache down, IIS up
Doctor Memory writes "Netcraft's June 2006 web server survey is out, and it shows IIS taking a dramatic upturn, at the expense of Apache. One of the biggest reasons cited is domain registrar Go Daddy switching to IIS for the domains it "parks". The report does go on to note that IIS is also making solid gains in active sites (including some large blog hosts), and further notes that it appears that large hosting companies are dropping Linux." Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's market share is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.
Just a thought, but Microsoft is probably as primed as ever to move aggressively on the Web Server market. Why not sooner? For one thing they've been busy locking down or trying to lock down everything else and manage the legal and foreign consortium attacks.
And, the first few generations of IIS weren't hardened. While Microsoft can (and has) dominated markets with non-superior products (not trolling, not saying "inferior", just not the best of breed), Apache got the classical head start on Microsoft, not necessarily (if ever) assurance of ultimate victory.
I've read articles, heard people talk -- it's hard to sort fact from fiction -- but I've heard stories of Microsoft coming in with big dollars and technical help to convert high profile and LARGE targets (Go Daddy, perhaps?) to their Web Server technology.
How do you resist that? If I had a large company and had ANY issues with Apache (who doesn't have any issues with any technology?, there's always something), I'd find it tempting to accept overtures from Microsoft.... "We'll come in and convert you to IIS, AND we'll help you do it, AND we'll give you money. All you have to do is brag on it in return."
I cringe just a little when I hear reassurances like (from the slashdot summary): "but note that Apache's marketshare is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment..." I remember using that as reason to be confident about the browser market... there was a time when Microsoft IE's share was less than 5%. We all know how that bad boy ended.
If this is what Microsoft is doing (and IMO I suspect it is) this smells of once again abusing their monopoly in OS to extend their control of new markets at the expense of fair competition.
Doesn't seem to matter much if it's true, the current administration (in general) has shown little interest or appetite in reining Microsoft in.
Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's marketshare is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.
Thank God. Why does it seem like if your favorite server software lost too much market share to Microsoft, you would pretty much be emasculated? Do geeks latch on to software like jocks latch on to sports teams, or what? No matter what is said, it always has to be punctuated by "but my team is the best." Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Thankfully, MS can only make so many gains this way. It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over. At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
These numbers are meaningless.
What possible difference could it make to me whether godaddy parks domains with IIS or apache? If godaddy's choice moves the stats in a significant way, then the stats aren't meaningful.
If this is what Microsoft is doing (and IMO I suspect it is) this smells of once again abusing their monopoly in OS to extend their control of new markets at the expense of fair competition.
Going into a business and offering to help convert to IIS isn't abusing its OS monopoly. They don't have anywhere near a monopoly on server OSs anyway. But of course I agree Microsoft is using its financial power and businesses shouldn't be quick to oblige.
Doesn't seem to matter much if it's true, the current administration (in general) has shown little interest or appetite in reining Microsoft in.
In fact one of the very first things Bush did when he entered the White House was remove all of the DOJ lawyers on the Microsoft monopoly case who had any legal experience with monopolies. Young lawyers replaced those already working on the case. And the expert independant counsil was fired without any explanation. Bush intentionally sabotaged the case against Microsoft.
Developers: We can use your help.
Statistics are fun to play with, of course, but note that Apache's marketshare is approximately 30% higher than IIS's at the moment.
Has anyone else noticed that Slashdot is pretty much incapable of publishing any story with so much as a tiny semblance of being pro-Microsoft without taking some sort of potshot somewhere in the summary?
I'm afraid I have to disagree.
It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over.
What makes you think they can't? They certainly have the scratch, and as they've shown in the past, they're not at all averse to taking large financial hits to ruin a competitor.
At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
Sure, until your PHB strolls in and declares that "we're switching to Microsoft!". Remember, Microsoft doesn't have to buy^H^H^Hconvince you, they just have to convince the guy who holds the purse strings.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
So when Microsoft gains some % in market share with IIS all Slashdotters cry out: "This must not be possible", "It isn't true", "These values are meaningless!". Yet when Firefox or some other $INSERT_FAVORITE_OSS_PROJECT gains a couple of % in market share over Microsoft, everyone is cheerful and never doubts the statistics.
I can't fathom why large hosting providers would switch unless something is happening under the radar. Even then, I've managed both Apache and IIS. IIS by far requires more of a hands on approach and Apache is far more versatile in what exactly you can do with it.
I've rolled my own self-healing scripts that manage my Apache servers and warn me if something is amiss. Our IIS servers can be a pain at times...
Yes it is interesting. Why would you pay for a system that just parks domains? These are static pages that don't carry much traffic. I have to wonder just how many copies of IIS are running to serve those parked domains? Five maybe? .net and asp. With Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Python being so popular that one may be hard sell.
As everybody with a brain will say, so what? For Microsoft to win this one big they need to get everyone to move to
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
*.blogspot.com should be counted as together, same with typepad.com. With all of the spam blogs created to boost google rankings, these should be counted collectively so as to err on the side of caution.
At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
.and the world will ignore you.
Build a better mouse trap . .
Market an inferior mouse trap and get rich.
Ever notice that car companies tout the fact that their product is the number one seller in something or other? Why do they do that when what someone else buys doesn't actually have anything to do with my taste and needs?
Because it works. The great masses are herd animals. They instinctively incline to doing what they see others doing. This is an overall positive virtue in a tribe seeking tribal survival. It is also extremely easy to exploit.
Back in the day sysadmins were taken largely from the highly educated, highly cynical, highly independent portion of the population, motivated by their own drummer, the computers themselves. Nowadays most of them are just typical examples of herd members who got into computers because that's what they saw everyone else doing; and, of course, that's "where the money was."
They can be led. And if they can't be led, they can be ordered.
KFG
That sounds an awful lot like a 'yes' to me...sure, I can't prove it, but if Microsoft didn't pay or offer incentives, I don't think Adelman would have had any trouble making that known.
I disagree. The standard response "We can't comment on rumors or speculation" (of which this is a variation) is given regardless of whether the rumor is true or not. Think about it: if a company said "We can't comment on rumors or speculation" when the rumor was true, but clearly said "No" when the rumor was false, they'd be giving it away. So they just say "No comment" to everything, and that way you never know whether it's true or false.
I'm not saying that your implication is correct or incorrect. I'm just saying that his response was perfectly standard, regardless of what the truth is.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
For the most part, the general Internet hosting market is pretty much the worthless segement of the market. Yes, this is an area where Apache/LAMP dominates, but mainly only because it's cheap for ISPs to offer the services and there's a ton of pre-cooked forum/ecomm/blog packages out there.
.NET much more often than Perl or PHP. (C) IIS is very very common on the Intranet, even for Java stuff.
When you get into custom developed sites, there's a few things to note -- (A) A large percentage run behind firewalls and will never be counted by Netcraft. (B) People tend to use Java or
The truth is nobody cares what GoDaddy uses to park domains. Maybe it's a technical test of IIS in some fashion, but is it really worth it for Microsoft to convert sites that aren't doing anything? Windows/IIS will never compete in the $20/month free PHP package market, so it's not really worth bothering about.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Apache is easy to use. There are a billion and one admins who know how to configure it. It's fast, extensible, and runs on Windows to boot. Why the hell would you want to run IIS if you're already running Apache? I have worked extensively in the hosting industry, and let me say that customers on IIS + ASP have many, many more problems than those running on an Apache + PHP/Perl based system.
In a web server environment, Windows costs more than Linux, period. Administration is more complex, downtime is more frequent (Windows requires you to reboot for a large number of security fixes,) site intrusions more destructive and harder to remove, and Windows Server 2003 gets very expensive in a server farm. Web hosting is a bottom dollar business; companies are trying to reduce IT costs, not raise them.
Windows is well suited for many environments. Web hosting is not one of them.
Seriously. Who cares about parked domains and what they are on. Parked domains are nothing more than a PR tool. A parked domain coudl be served from a dead simple serve-only-the-parked-page custom binary/script. Anybody relying or relishing how many domains are parked on their software has issues. Particularly since it wouldn't take much for a registrar to "park" a very high number of domains on whatever combo they wished. About the only interesting stat in the Netcraft report is that a little more than half of all "domains" are "parked". Half the domains on the web are nothing more than "for sale" signs by domain name speculators and entities who couldn't buy real webspace.
For those who actually care or might need to know which software serves up the most active domains, a report on just those is more beneficial.
Even then, why does anyone care how many domains are on what software? After all, a domain could be served up by multiple machines running different OS/Software combinations. So those numbers wouldn't be accurate either. Further, for those who may need to know "what server is best" these numbers only add confusion due to irrelevance. If you are setting up a truly large site, you'd better already know your stuff and don't need this kind of 'data'. The only data of this type that would be useful to you would be what the really busy sites run. Even then it also depends on active vs. dynamic.
As far as hostnames running a given OS, this too is not valuable due to key factor assumptions. The assumption underlying this statistic is that more is better. This is beyond mere OS capability. All hosts are not equal. A Linux box running a website(s) on 400MHz Pentium is not comparable to a Windows box on say a DL580, or vica versa. Regardless of OS in this case the DL580 will be capable of serving "more" of whatever it is serving.
The Netcraft web server report is a curious statistic and should be taken as nothing more.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
When netcraft numbers favor Apache/open source, the streamers fly and there's nothing but back patting on how this proves {insert open source alternative here} is a better product.
But soon as MS gets some positive numbers. "OH THOSE ARE ALL INFLATED NUMBERS THAT MEAN NOTHING!"
Guys pick a standard to hold things too and stick to it.
Personally I don't care who's on top, long as what I use works for me.
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The parent seems to discredit the survey by saying "It is fun to play with statistics." Obviously trying to cast doubt on the numbers by saying that they can be moved around to suite ones needs.
I don't think that's necessarily what it was saying, just that statistics only say what they say. The statistics are probably 100% accurate in what they're saying, the important thing is to make sure that you don't read too much into them (which people are known to do).
"If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything."
I don't know who said this originally, but it's a great comment.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"So, basically, it looks like Microsoft paid Go Daddy to switch to IIS for their domains, the vast majority of which were parked anyway, in a rather transparent attempt to massage the numbers. Quelle suprise."
Or maybe Godaddy just wants to experiment with IIS and is starting with non-critical systems. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than this all being a crazy conspiracy.
I can't prove it, but if Microsoft didn't pay or offer incentives, I don't think Adelman would have had any trouble making that known.
This is not an uncommon practice in the software industry. Some call it a "competitive upgrade discount," where you get kickbacks for switching from XYZ software to my software. Anyone who works with IT vendors in a large-ish corporate environment has played the NetWare, Linux, Notes, Oracle, etc. card with their regional MS rep.
Microsoft has a history of almost giving away Windows to corporations because they know you will come back for Server, Exchange, SQL, etc. That is why, at the end of the day so many corporations are MS shops - it isn't that much more expensive than anything else, and you have the advantage of your workforce already being trained on the OS and Office suite. And cheap(er) IT labor.
The last company I worked for bought the ERP package Navision from Microsoft in part because it is a new product/market for them and they offered a ton of help setting it up and supporting it. They even wrote a $5K check ("Make it Right Funds") post-install when a developer fucked up some of our data and we were down for a day.
Say what you will, but I don't know how this is bad for the consumer.
So tell me again how I should have stuck it out and gone down with the company. I go around talking principles and freedom, I go broke. I stick the word "Microsoft" on my marketing materials, and I make money. Go ahead. Argue with that. Tell me how I should have been happy to lose my house, my car, every dime of my savings, and all the other crap I would have lost riding the open source handbasket.
I left a high paying Microsoft-related job for a low paying open source job. And I'm much happier now. You obviously invested all of your time and money in the wrong market. Don't blame your own failure on open source. That's childish.
Screw you people, I know who butters my bread.
You don't butter your own bread? You apparently don't own your own company for the pleasure of being independant. And if you think you must work with Microsoft to make a living then you're very ignorant.
Developers: We can use your help.
Microsoft isn't abusing monopoly here at all. They are using the fact that they have such an enormous war chest of cash. It isn't illegal to say, "We're going to adopt a long-term strategy that costs us untold millions so that we can win in the end.".
With the browser war, Microsoft won by abusing their monopoly a bit-- no doubt.
But this is good old fashioned capitalism.
I predate TSS, let alone the Internet and my mother was a government mainframe operator before my time. I am not confused.
There was a time when the corporate boss, totally lacking the armament of buzzwords (except maybe "transistor"), did not even have the tools to express an order (within the domain of the article) to a sysadmin/operator. And if the sysadmin didn't like it where he was, he walked. And the boss knew it.
This was power, because a sysadmin could not simply be replaced with another cog. The Register's BOFH is so bitingly funny because he has a real life model in real world situations.
A Fortune 500 CEO would approach the OC as a Greek king would approach the oracle at Delphi; as just another supplicant to be fleeced by mystical powers well beyond his comprehension.
This is why they started buying PCs. Didn't work too well. Just because the boss now had a small, powerful computer of his very own didn't mean he understood a single thing about it.
The boss gained real power over the sysadmin only when the technical "colleges" started pumping out generic, interchangable "sysadmins" in excess of demand, sometime in the mid/late 80s. And hence Dilbert became so bitingly funny because it had real life models in real life situations.
Dilbert dates only from the early 90s.
KFG
If you don't have the time to check your facts, you shouldn't be saying that another guy is wrong.
It's not so much a question of buy-off as it is an offering of free services in exchange for mindshare.
That is the fine line Microsoft historically walks, and has done so with great success in the past. That is why IE is dominant--they took the hit offering it for free to cut the legs out from under Netscape and other competitors. As an aside, they also did it for another reason--IE started life as a Microsoft-branded version of Spyglass Mosaic. BillG absolutely abhors paying royalties based on sales and prefers licensing with a flat-fee. Spyglass insisted on a royalty and becasue MS needed to get a browser out there quickly they "caved" and offered a percentage of revenue. It wasn't long after IE debuted on the Plus! pack that MS released Win95A with IE included for free...and we all know what any percentage of zero dollars is...
The original poster contended MS could pay big companies to switch to them in exchange for positive publicity, which would actually be illegal becasue it goes beond giveaways and deep discounts and ventured into collusion territory. Although there isn't a very solid case against MS for "being generous" there are other things they do that present a strong case that they are abusing their monopoly:
* extensions to standards that only work with their OS (ActiveX, Active Directory...) - such a strategy only works if you have big enough market share to establish de-facto standards
* "tight coupling" using closed/proprietary (and usually obsfucated) methods to make less established products (such as its server products like its "Microsoft Dynamics" line) interoperate with its dominant products (MS Office). This creates firm vendor lock-in for enterprise customers. A more loosely-coupled, standards-based approach would allow 3rd party competitors to interoperate with MS products (like OpenOffice with Sharepoint, or using PostgreSQL as a backend for Reporting Services). Vendor lock-in is not illegal itself, but when it's done to leverage a monopoly product it is arguably abuse of a monopoly position.
I'm not sure how well it'll work against Apache, since it is a more established, mature system than IIS and Apache is already free (and Free) whereas Netscape relied on revenue from its browser and server products. Ultimately, I think that it'll result in a dramatic lowering of MS' server product licensing fees with a much larger MS market share (closer to 50/50 with Apache), or they'll hit a wall and no amount of price deals will help. It all depends on how well Apache development continues against IIS and how well IIS holds up under heavier use.
> Little things like...oh...the Sherman Antitrust Act, anti-dumping provisions in the WTO, and likely future court rulings and legislation that might result from that sort of behaviour
OK, so let me just get this straight. You're actually serious here...
You think, that what's gonna stop MICROSOFT from doing something grossly unethical would be...
THE LAW?! LMAO!
Mod me down if you want for pointing it out, but the law has about as much effect on Microsoft as I do. They've PROVEN that they're above the law before. How many times do they have to do that before you accept it? Microsoft (like any ridiculously rich company) can do whatever it wants. It's the law that has to adapt.
> (especially from the EU and Asian countries that are slowly growing more hostile to Microsoft).
Well...Maybe non-US governments will treat them a little less gently. But keep in mind, politicians in those countries love money just as much as our US politicians do. And--more importantly--look at what happened the last time the mighty EU got angry at Microsoft: A few fines and Windows XP Home Edition "N." Oooh, what a mighty blow for justice! Yep, offering that edition righted all the wrongs. Justice served and lesson learned, right? Thanks, EU! Yeah. Right. Pardon me while I choke on the lameness of that punishment.
Welcome to capitalism. This is how we do things.