Full Frontal Assault on Apache?

MacJedi writes "Freshmeat has an excellent article about a possible Microsoft strategy to capture the web from both the server and the client ends. " The article itself does a good job of dissecting recent comments from Steve Ballmer, as well as what some of the new items in Win2k portend for our favorite web server.

Comments

Slightly wrong

[Matts]

Frontpage 2000 (which implements all the upload stuff which you wrote about) is going to be DAV compatible, as are the new frontpage server extensions (yuck!). Unsurprisingly Apache has a mod_dav available which implements the full DAV standard, and they've even done some work with MS to get the FPSE up to scratch DAV-wise.

So - you'll be able to do all that with Apache too - and the usual "and more.." stuff that goes with Apache too.

Matt.

perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

Missing the real thrust

[edremy]

The author missed the real thrust of MS's efforts to get more webserver share.

It's not IIS, or some small webserver- it's Office 2k and the followups. No matter what Slashdot readers may think of Office, it is the office suite the world runs on. The newest version of Office have very tight integration with the web and IIS- for example, you can place live spreadsheets on the web using Excel. This is going to go over big in office intranets- it makes sharing documents really trivial.

Guess what- these functions don't run under Apache. Thus, IS staff have to maintain an IIS webserver to get the features that the various Office2k users want. (And I'll assure you they'll want them.)

Best of all, this is a no risk strategy wrt the Justice Department. All they're doing is improving their office suite, which Justice can't stop. Sure they're trying to kill Apache, but Apache isn't a company, and they aren't undercutting Apache's price to drive it out of the market since Apache is already free.

I've got to admire MS on this one. This is one seriously well designed strategy. They can't make headway against basic web stuff, so they'll leverage their real monopoly (Forget Windows- it's Office.) to make the basic web seem much less useful. It might even work.

Eric