Linux servers post strong growth in Q3 (TG Daily)

Posted Nov 24, 2005 6:08 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Statistics are very funny things.

There is a very strong limit to what is recorded by these things... IBM, HP, Dell and such are publicly traded company and so they publish sales, so does Microsoft.

However what about people that build their own systems, or buy from local 'white box' suppliers and stuff like that? How many people will go out and buy a Dell 'Desktop' system and turn that into a low-end server? (with Linux this is very common, with windows it isn't since the cost of the software license is greater when seperated from the hardware) Those things will never realy be properly recorded.

Also people don't disclose what the servers are actually used for.. If Windows is being used for business critical SQL server stuff, while you have a Linux server for a simple print server.. then obviously Windows is much more impressive and more important to pay attention.

If company A sold 10 servers one month then sold 20 servers the next month then thats a 100% growth and is very impressive looking. However if company B sold 100 servers one month and sold 120 servers the next then that's only a 20% growth.. even though company B has twice as much new servers then company A then the previous quarter (this is partially the situation with Windows vs Linux growth).

Also it depends on your perspective.

Obviously for a 'tech' oriented website like this the actual numbers and type of deployement of the servers is much more interesting. So we look at it in terms of numbers of servers sold..

But for a more general site the authors probably figure less people care about the amount of servers sold, but care much more about the amount of servers _sales_ and the amount of money that generates.

Windows server growth in terms of revenue for Microsoft is fantastic lately compared with previous years. (or so it seems to me) Obviously Windows server is much more expensive to license then something like Redhat, but that hardly matters if people are willing to spend it. They generate much more software revenue then anything Linux servers do.

The truly remarkable thing about Linux's growth is that it continues to _accelerate_.

There was a lot of speculation that Linux 'early' adopters bought Linux because it's simply a inexpensive alternative to Unix for low end stuff. It's a very finite market and it was expected that Linux's growth would slow as the market for those type of customers got saturated.

This is a normal and expected thing for any product, even if it looks bad.

However with Linux the growth curve is not slowing.. it's accelerating. Almost like a exponational growth, as if the more Linux servers out there people have, the more then want to buy more Linux servers.

This is like the 10th or 12th quarter that the percentage of Linux server growth has actually increased from the previous quarter, even though the market for Linux becomes much larger... or something like that.