Is Linux really losing market share to Windows? (Linux-Watch)

[Posted October 26, 2007 by ris]

Linux-Watch takes a look at an IDG server report that shows Linux losing in the server market. "Let's look closer at what IDG is really doing. First, the actual number of Linux servers is still increasing. What's "decreased" is its rate of increase. Despite the impression you may get from Microsoft ads, almost no one is turning in Linux servers for Windows servers."

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Dell

Posted Oct 26, 2007 23:23 UTC (Fri) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (6 responses)

Another interesting counterpoint is Dell's recent observation that for them sales of Linux servers are growing faster than for Windows servers.

Dell's Numbers, were not there

Posted Oct 27, 2007 14:22 UTC (Sat) by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983) [Link] (5 responses)

The statements were very qualitative, hence, growing faster might only be growth rate in
percentage.  Starting from a smaller base that is more easily accomplished.  Growing faster
would be significant, if the numbers sold appeared to be pulling close to the servers leaving
the door with a MS server OS.

It is difficult to discern what the real meaning of the Dell remarks were.

Dell's Numbers, were not there

Posted Oct 27, 2007 17:36 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

If they are talking in percentages then that's easy to understand.

If Dell sells 5% of it's servers with Linux and 95% of their servers with Windows and next
year they are selling 7% Linux and 93% Windows then that's a 50% increase in Linux sales in
one year.

That sounds cool.

But it's less cool to say they sold 450,000 Windows servers and 24,000 Linux servers in one
year and then sold 470,000 Windows servers and 35,000 Linux servers the next year... Which is
probably pretty much what is happenning nowadays.

But Linux is probably loosing is pretty accurate.

It's the desktop. That's the problem.

I've heard people say "Well the desktop is dead and the future is web-based applications"..
which is fine and dandy.

But that's wrong thinking. Microsoft stills owns the platform on which your web apps are being
delivered. This gives them control and they are going to do everything they can to make sure
that it's their webapps, not yours, that are going to be used.
Hence (when combined with the better security you get from IIS over Apache) you get things
like this:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/10/11/october_2007...

Apache has fallen to less then 50% of the market. Sure sure Microsoft is playing games with
people who own massive numbers of domains and Google switched from reporting their servers as
apache to google's own platform and things of that nature so that needs to be taken into
considuration.. but with things like Microsoft spending millions of dollars to purchase and
control thigns like Facebook you know that they are doing their best to make sure that it's
THEIR webapps, not Linux's.

The vast majority of servers are being sold nowadays are in the desktop support role, I
figure. In this role Linux has little to no place.

Why?

Because Microsoft controls the desktop.

Take modern Microsoft oriented office environment:
Windows desktop for complex desktop applications.
Microsoft Office for office apps and simple desktop applications.
Exchange server for email, calendering, and document management.
Sharepoint server for Intranets, CMS, personal/departmental websites, document versioning,
etc.
MS SQL runs the back ends for Microsoft office applications, sharepoint server, etc etc.
Active Domain server for identity management, desktop application management, file management,
server management, etc etc.
Visual Studio for application development.

Microsoft has this shit _locked_down_. Web, desktop, email, security, etc. They even made sure
that Firefox can't work in this type of environment (without reduced functionality)

Sure Linux has better web server. Linux has better email, pretty good desktop, and passable
Office apps. It's domain stuff is still very difficult.. but the end result is usually better.
Linux uses less resources, can be customized much easier, and all sorts of things that make it
superior in each role.

But what is going to happen if you have a whole-hog Microsoft ecosystem like the one I
described above and you try to replace any portion of it with a Linux-based solution?

Pick anything you want.

Try to replace Exchange with Linux email. It'll break the Office integration, Active
directory Integration, Windows desktop integration, etc etc. The end result is obviously
either a massive increase in cost (to make it 'work' in the existing system) or a large
decrease in functionality.

Try to replace the Sharepoint with a Linux CMS.. Plone for example. Plone is probably much
better then Sharepoint, but it'll break the desktop integration, active directory integration,
etc

So on and so forth.

The end result is that there is no place for Linux in a ecosystem like that. Microsoft is
clever on how they designed the integration. And every year it's going to just get tighter.

How to compete? I figure you provide easy plug-n-play infrastructure based entirely around
Linux that smaller companies can convert easily to before they adopt the entire Microsoft
corporate environment. Better, cheaper, faster. I don't know beyond that.

Dell's Numbers, were not there

Posted Oct 28, 2007 0:25 UTC (Sun) by conz (guest, #4784) [Link]

The situation you describe is a common one, particularly this aspect:

But what is going to happen if you have a whole-hog Microsoft ecosystem like the one I described above and you try to replace any portion of it with a Linux-based solution?

Yes, desktops are still, and will remain for a long time, the critical leverage fulcrum for platform success, be it Linux/FOSS or Microsoft's.

Yes, Microsoft vertically-integrated stack are essentially impregnable.

However, the percentage of organisations which are this locked in to the Microsoft stack is small. That leaves the larger part of the market open for us to offer alternative, Linux-based solutions.

Also, the more mainstream desktop Linux users, the more overall comfort there will be by IT pros helping their organisations move to FOSS.

For the equivalent of breaking larger iceberg chunks off the great Microsoft ice-sheet (ie, vertically-integrated hegemony), look to the various governments worldwide, many of which are shifting to ODF and FOSS. The more of these that break away, the more their constituent businesses will follow, the more that this will weaken the structural integrity of the Microsoft ice-sheet. Which is why any and all such moves must be strongly encouraged.

IIS security, personal web servers, and virtualisation

Posted Oct 28, 2007 7:03 UTC (Sun) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

Other people have addressed the reliability of these statistics given that Linux is frequently
downloaded and installed for free, and not 'sold' with hardware.

On the issue of "IIS giving better security than Apache" - do you have any references for this
statement at all? IIS7 sounds like a major rewrite which may be good for security and ease of
admin, but could also introduce new holes - see
http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/07/iis-vs-apac... for blog posting by an IIS
developer who also professes some respect for Apache.

This Google survey from June 2007 shows that IIS is still responsible for far more malware
hosting per 1000 servers than Apache:
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/06/web-serv... .  Of
course, the hosting of malware can be due to web apps not just the web server, but this survey
implies that either IIS administrators are less competent in finding and security-updating
their web apps and web server, or that IIS itself makes it harder to run a secure web server
and to write secure web apps.

On the desktop web server side - I have some experience of this from writing install guides
etc for TWiki (http://twiki.org/) on Windows. Largely because it's so hard to configure CGI
apps under IIS (at least the versions I was helping with), some quite expert people simply
gave up on TWiki on IIS and went with Apache instead (see
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/TWikiWindowsIIS for some comments here).  IIS 7 may have
made it easier to configure IIS here, and includes FastCGI, which may help (although most CGI
apps don't support FastCGI out of the box - SpeedyCGI might be easier to support).

With non-IIS web servers, it's significantly easier to install TWiki - e.g.
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiForWindowsPersonal can run from a USB flash drive, or
simply be unzipped onto the C: drive.  Or if you need a server that can start personal and
become a workgroup/corporate server without reinstallation, you can use the VMware route using
a VM such as http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiVMDebianStable - just download a
pre-installed Debian VM including TWiki, and run it with no configuration - this is
consistently one of the most popular pages on the TWiki.org site.

Of course, native IIS web apps may be easier to install than CGI apps, but Apache is still the
dominant player.  For the personal server market, I would also look carefully at the role of
virtualisation technology such as VMware (and Parallels on Mac) - it's far easier to simply
install a preconfigured 'virtual appliance' including a web server and web app than it is to
install and configure them by hand (well, unless you are on Debian or Ubuntu in which case a
TWiki install is just an 'aptitude install apache2 twiki').

Microsoft supports virtualization on desktops through Virtual PC, which I believe is quite
competitive - however, its restrictive licensing of what you can install in VMs means that you
can't use it with Home editions of XP or Vista, not even with Vista Premium which is quite
expensive: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/ - and I don't think such home
editions include IIS anyway.

So...  if you want to rapidly install a desktop web server with web app, the quickest route is
to unzip a server+app combination onto a USB drive or hard disk, not using a Microsoft web
server.  Or if you have more RAM/CPU and want a more functional installation, you simply
download a virtual appliance and run that - but that can't include a Microsoft OS or web
server for licensing reasons.  VMware has a huge library of freeware and open source
appliances here: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

I'm sure I have a somewhat biased view as TWiki is a CGI app that is developed on Linux/Unix,
but I have written a lot of material on how to install it on Windows, and it does seem that
Microsoft's proprietary software model leads to significant restrictions on what you can do,
particularly if you don't work in a large company with a corporate software assurance
agreement that ensures any version of Windows/IIS can be used without charge.

TWiki on IIS

Posted Oct 28, 2007 23:20 UTC (Sun) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

Most people wouldn't install TWiki on IIS.  They'd install Sharepoint on IIS.

IIS security, personal web servers, and virtualisation

Posted Oct 29, 2007 14:58 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

If you are installing TWiki then it is strange that you sound so concerned for security...
TWiki unfortunately has a very poor security track record.

generic hardware not counted

Posted Oct 27, 2007 0:52 UTC (Sat) by wildpossum (guest, #17744) [Link] (6 responses)

Sites I know buy a generic rack server or even a white box and install Linux on it. Those get
counted nowhere.

generic hardware not counted

Posted Oct 27, 2007 17:10 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

Yup, to a sales survey I can imagine the business I work for looks like

20-30 Windows desktops
10-20 Windows laptops
3-5 Mac laptops
1 Windows file & print server
100 or so generic 1U rack servers, no OS

So the fact that one laptop user runs Fedora, the Mac users often run Windows, and the generic
1U rack machines are all CentOS doesn't appear on the radar. But, the survey companies have
actually recognised this since the outset of their Linux coverage a decade or so ago. You will
see it mentioned in their full reports. It's just that it doesn't translate into a sentence
fragment for a magazine headline.

Of course most businesses probably own more desktops than servers, but there are going to be
more and more exceptions (Google may already be a very large and identifiable example...)

generic hardware not counted

Posted Oct 27, 2007 20:46 UTC (Sat) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (2 responses)

A better approximation would perhaps be calculable thus:

Total number of desktops = number of desktop CPUs sold  by intel + amd.
 (or, count motherboards).

Total number of Macs = number of machines sold by apple.

Total number of Windows machines = number that connect to windows update.

Total Linux = CPUs - (Macs + Windows).

That should probably give a decent-ish upper-bound estimate for Linux.

generic hardware not counted

Posted Oct 27, 2007 22:29 UTC (Sat) by keithw (guest, #3127) [Link]

Execpt for everybody who's bought a laptop & junked XP to install linux.  Taxes work best when
it is more effort to avoid them than to just pony up.

Chips and counts

Posted Oct 28, 2007 0:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Total Linux = CPUs - (Macs + Windows).

That kind of approximation needs a lot of refinement: some machines sold by Apple contain Intel chips, and some of them run Linux (both with Intel and PowerPC chips).

After all chips are properly accounted for, only Microsoft can do the math: only they know how many machines connect to Windows Update. Even so, many machines are not connected to the internet, or have been decommissioned long ago. You have to estimate the percentages for each scenario, so it becomes grossly inaccurate even with Microsoft data. And even before *BSD fans come screaming at you.

generic hardware not counted

Posted Oct 27, 2007 21:02 UTC (Sat) by danielhedblom (guest, #47307) [Link]

We have bought many servers destined for Linux but never ever have they shipped with Linux. We
also have converted old Windows boxes to various tasks like firewalling, proxies, ftp and so
on. 

Im pretty shure IDC doesnt count appliances either, even if they are big NAS servers with
Linux in them.

What theese numbers can suggest is also that more people buys white boxes and use them for
Linux. That would be a very high grade for Linux as it shows it demands less support from
vendors than other operating systems do.

not all servers are equal

Posted Oct 29, 2007 15:02 UTC (Mon) by Im26 (subscriber, #48749) [Link]

I know a site using a linux server built by us from commodity parts running all their business
critical database applications.

The same customer has 2 windows servers specifically for email, a windows sftp server, 3 file
servers, a datawhorehouse server, a vpn server and a couple of backup servers. There are
several other boxes whose purpose we have never worked out including a strange firewall box
that only has a single network cable plugged in. Most of this is duplicated across to a second
site.

Adding to that a couple of print servers and all the desktops gives you a pretty impressive
windows count. But its the linux box that is on 24x7, its the linux box that earns the money,
and its the linux box that has proper DR redundant backups off site that would be up 5 minutes
after the event.

Of course I would say that though, I think our data is important, that's why we chose Linux!

Ian