Ballmer: Apache is simply better

Armin writes "Microsoft's Steve Ballmer praised the Apache Webserver in a key note this weekend in Austria. Article is in German, use babelfish."

Comments

Read between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballmer is not saying Apache is better. He is saying Apache is better to host multiple web sites on a single physical machine. If you look at the market and the next push, that aspect is irrelevant.

He did not say Apache was faster nor did he say Apache had more features. This he will never say because that would actually admit IIS does not work as well.

Why is he doing double talk? Simple think in context of DOJ. The judge in the DOJ case cannot distinguish the difference in what makes a best server. All the judge sees is competition. So to the judge there is competition and no case.
(I read the court proceedings and have to say that they could have nailed MS's butt to the wall if they were more technically savy)

And lets not forget, what does Ballmer do in Microsoft? Marketing!!! Bill G is good, but the real marketing brain is Ballmer!!!! So he would never admit such a thing without an ulterior motive.

Re:Webservers are an interesting competitive space

[Wee]

The competition between Apache and Netscape is interesting because they so rarely compete. The best way to sum up this up is to quote a sysadmin friend of mine. He said, "If I was going to run a website myself, I'd pick Apache. It's powerful and fast and stable. But if I had to run a site for a company, I'd pick Netscape. Hiring people qualified with whatever flavor or Perl/Apache/UNIX/mod_perl I choose is too hard and too expensive."

Ogren hit the nail on the head with the first quote, and I can prove it. Take a look at eudora.com and then qualcomm.com .

And while I agree that hiring UNIX geeks with the right mix of skills can be a daunting task, the last statement really doesn't address the true root of the "problem" (the problem being that people don't get to use Apache): IT managers and bean counters are still scared about the supposed lack of support with OSS. Especially when it has to run their web site (even though their ftp site might be run by OSS, they couldn't care as long as "their Internet" doesn't go down). Using a possible lack of qualified talent as an excuse for Netscape Server's existence is really feeble.

I don't remember where I heard this, but it's been shown that people won't buy things if those things' selling price doesn't match or exceed what the buyer believes it ought to cost. If I was selling Mont Blanc pens for $10, would you buy one? If Mont Blanc itself sold them for $10, do you think they would be as popular as they are? Part of what makes $20 cigars so good is that they cost $20, and you can tell yourself and your friends that you're smoking really pricey cigars and that you're a big shot because of it. It doesn't make the cigars taste any better in the same way that Bic pens write just as well as the more expensive models.

When people buy Netscape servers, they want to feel the same way. Even if they are running it on Solaris (or Linux or whatever), and they already have the talent/hardware to run Apache, they won't. They'd rather pay for Netscape than use Apache for free. Because if Apache doesn't cost money, how can it be worth anything? (And usually after that thought, they trot out that "no support" thing as a final excuse they know they can use and get away with without looking like a clueless idiot.) The the only reason people run Netscape servers on any UNIX is because the decision makers/PHBs don't know any better.

-B

Translated into English

[Twinky]

Here are the important quotes from the original page:

"If we don't offer enough features at our servers, that justify our prices, it is our own fault. Apache is simply better than us, regarding hosting of multiple sites on one serverversion."

"StarOffice will not stay on the market."

About Linux:
"One of the five problems that bother me before I sleep. But I still sleep rather well."

About the trial:
"We broke no law. We will not join the fate of IBM, ten years trial and at the end loss of marketleadership."

AOL:
"Cool Company. We will fight aggressively with AOL for marketshares."

Furthermore:
There will be no Office 2000 for Apple. (Wait for 2001)
2 Million TestUsers didn't find many bugs in the past five months. M$ is now counting on the customers for that matter.

Webservers are an interesting competitive space

[ogren]

Ballmer is not saying that Apache is better, merely conceding the virtual hosting market to Apache. Which Apache wins hands down. His remarks are an interesting insight into the competition between the three major webservers. You have only three serious competitors: IIS, Netscape Enterprise Server, and Apache. And each has its own niche that it dominates in, leaving only a small intersection of real competition.

Apache is an interesting success story. It's one of the most successful open source projects of all time. Apache dominates certain spaces of the web server market, such as the virtual hosting space that Ballmer is conceding, along with the ISP market, and the "Slashdot" space. By the Slashdot space, I mean sites that have highly talented administrators and programmers, lots of traffic, but little money. mod_perl gives Apache an enormous adantages. Shashdot is doing things in mod_perl that other webservers can only offer through expensive application servers. But Apache is reasonably complicated, especially when you starting adding things like mod_perl to the mix. If you know what you are doing, it's great, but there's an intimidating learning curve.

Netscape Enterprise Server Since I work for Netscape I won't say much about Netscape's webserver, since people would think that I'm too biased anyway. But, in short, Netscape seems to cover the exact opposite of Apache's market. People who have the money to spend on a webserver (Netscape is the only webserver you have to pay money for), and are willing to pay that money in exchange for easier manageability and a formal support agreement.

Microsoft's IIS is the most interesting of the three. It's the quicksand solution. There are only three reasons to use IIS:

1. It was pre-installed on my server. What a lame reason. But lots of people use IIS for a workgroup solution because of this reason.
2. I'm building a Microsoft-centric solution. Once you start building an ASP-based solution, you're stuck. You have nowhere else to turn. The cost of converting to Perl or JavaScript is just too high. You've walled yourself into a proprietary solution.
3. It's what I know. Microsoft makes a lot of money on the database server and workgroup server market, because "any idiot can use it".

In short, M$'s webserver is a piece of crap. And everyone knows it, but some people are in a world where they either don't care, or don't have a choice.

So Ballmer can concede the virtual hosting market all that he wants. It doesn't matter to him. Those people need a real solution anyway. His customers are the uneducated and the ones that are boxed in to M$ solutions.

The competition between Apache and Netscape is interesting because they so rarely compete. The best way to sum up this up is to quote a sysadmin friend of mine. He said, "If I was going to run a website myself, I'd pick Apache. It's powerful and fast and stable. But if I had to run a site for a company, I'd pick Netscape. Hiring people qualified with whatever flavor or Perl/Apache/UNIX/mod_perl I choose is too hard and too expensive."

I don't know if I agree with him completely. The actual feature to feature comparison is interesting, but I'm too biased to make that comparison here. But it shows the marketplace's attitude: that the decision between Apache and Netscape is a choice between whether to spend money on a product or on administrators.