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Linux: One quarter of the server market by 2003

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the getting-bigger-by-the-day dept.

weezer writes "LinuxToday has a nice little article about a Dataquest study that claims that Linux will account for about 24% of the server market by 2003. "

1 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Somewhat possible to tell now... by Frater+219 · · Score: 5

    I, for one, expect Windows 2000 to flop rather nicely in the server market. Here's why:

    1. Anyone who has been paying attention to the past few Microsoft releases would know that they have been increasingly less popular than expectations predicted. IIRC, MS shipped about half as many Windows 98 upgrades as they expected in the first few months; 98 became dominant not on the strength of upgrades but on the strength of the growth of the new-PC market. The idea that people need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading is declining.

    2. NT itself has peaked and is in decline in some server markets, notably the Web server market. Microsoft Web servers have been declining in market share for months on the Netcraft survey of Web servers. People are realizing that Microsoft systems are not reliable and scalable, much less enterprise-ready. Why buy more of the same?

    3. W2k will break some third-party software that runs fine under current NT releases. This is just how MS operates. Sites which expect not to have catastrophic failures will wait and test W2k for some time before deploying it as a replacement for current NT systems, as the Gartner Group recommended several months ago. In the meantime, sites which rush ahead and move to W2k will have the usual early-adopter problems that any new system has. This will generate horror stories which will reduce other sites' interest in W2k. Vendors of Unix- and Linux-based systems will, if they know what they're doing, capitalize on these failures. (They may even FUD Microsoft back, though of course I wouldn't support that ....)

    4. W2k will not live up to the hype. MS has already (quietly) admitted that the widely-hyped Active Directory is not a directory at all (in the sense of X.500 and LDAP) but rather a flat pseudo-directory. Expect more of the same.

    5. Finally, there's Y2k. Nobody's going to make any major changes to their mission-critical now, and in January there will be enough mopping-up to do that they'll delay still more.

    Windows 2000 may well be a good deal better than NT. But will people gamble their businesses on it to the degree they've gambled them on NT? I think we can expect not.

    Meanwhile, Linux-based systems are doing nothing but growing. What's the safe bet if you want to be using a platform that will continue to grow, survive, and thrive over the next ten years?