Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS 514
Ivan writes "
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.""
This is impressive... (Score:1, Insightful)
Servers (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay - but are they equal in sale price?
What weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers? They both weigh the same but you do end up with a lot more feathers.
Article seems misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Could it possibly be that Unix server sales are down because Unix servers (non-free) are being replaced with Linux servers (free)? How surprising would it then be that the dollar value spent on servers is lower for Unix?
not necessarily (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty silly..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is impressive... (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux is third, so it must just be real Unix variants.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the cause is probably somewhere in between.
It's only the latter and it's only about revenue (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyway, for the first time Linux conquered the third spot when it comes to revenue and it continues to be the fastes growing system.
IDC Server Study (Score:4, Insightful)
The funny thing is that people's reactions are entirely based on the headline. If Slashdot runs the story as "Linux Server Revenue Up!", half the comments are about Microsoft going out of business or whatever. If they run the larger Windows numbers in the headline, everyone complains.
Anyway -- Here's a laundry list of objections that will no doubt appear:
+ This study doesn't count the servers I have running Gentoo/Debian/etc
-- Most of the revenue reported is actually hardware, so yes it does
+ How would they know what I'm running on my servers? I didn't get a preinstalled OS
-- User surveys, statistical methods, etc. It's not an exact count.
+ My *nix servers have 234 CPUs and run more applications than my Windows servers
-- Because the survey counts $$$ and not CPU or box counts, this sorta works itself out, but I guess this is valid.
+ We put Linux on our i486-33 Servers
-- Who cares? IDC doesn't, they're counting new server revenue.
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:3, Insightful)
An administrator is a lot more likely to purchase a system without an OS and obtain his *nix distribution seperately, as there is no cost benefit and it gives him the ability to install and configure the OS without having to wipe a factory install.
No, it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty silly to count Unix and Linux separately.
No, it isn't; it would be silly to lump them together.
TFA was about sales. There are commercial Unix variants that cost money; Linux by itself does not. (There may be costs, e.g. when the Linux vendor includes N months of support, but this is not the same as paying for the OS.) Lumping 'non-free' and 'free' [as in beer] together would be like putting two dissimilar things in the same category.
Sales != Usage (Score:3, Insightful)
{ Waiting for Microsoft evil empire conspiracy posts... }
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think there's any equivalent in the Linux world that doesn't require a lot of *nix talent for customization. (And the actual amount of *nix talent in the small biz market is practically zero.)
So, as long as the Linux world is so focused on Wall Street, it shouldn't be a suprise that Windows is outselling them on Main Street.
Momentum... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is it simply that Linux is chewing into UNIX market share? They way that headline sounds one might think this is a case of pure market share gain for Microsoft at the expense of UNIX which is probably not the case here.
inevitable rise (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
Re:not necessarily (Score:4, Insightful)
"doesnt this really just suggest that windows servers need regular replacing to keep doing their job while old unix hardware keeps doing its job just fine?"
No.
If you are making a living in IT you know that you are still replacing servers as they roll off warranty and as they are fully depreciated. I'd no more put one of my Oracle databases on an old Linux machine than an old Windows machine. Requirements always go up, not down. Saying you can run Linux on older hardware is a misleading statement.
I suppose if a company is using Linux because it was free, or using UNIX of some form because it "runs on older hardware" they get what they deserve anyway - that's not the way to run an IT shop.
The change is likely due to the increase in blade-type systems which are well suited to a Windows environment. You can use a UNIX server environment and have interoperability with the end-users' desktop systems and the domain security model, but when you can just plug another cheap blade in and not have to worry about a third party authentication scheme, it makes Windows a pretty easy choice. Some of the arguments posted about not being able to run more than one app are not a shortcoming in the OS but rather a shortcoming in the developers. Plus, who cares if you need 5x$1000 blades to run 5 apps on Windows? It would cost more than $5000 to get the same sort of horsepower in a UNIX box.
Tools my friends, these are just tools. They don't know or care if you religiously defend them. Your IT careers will be more successful if you learn to use a variety of tools, each what is appropriate for the job.
Reduced headcount is Windoze only benefit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
So - for every box purchased, pre-loaded with Linux, it also generated a *sale* for Microsoft.
Now, it's been a year or two since I last checked into this, so I cannot say whether or not this *agreement* is still in force. However, I would not be surprised to see this still be the case.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
How many Windows boxes where replaced with Linux last year where I work? Answer: None. How many Unix systems where replaced with Linux? Answer: Hundreds.
This is why Windows/Linux eats into HP-UX/AIX/Solaris market share.
Neither (Score:5, Insightful)
So, all of the free downloads and installs are not counted here. Windows had a lot of sales, unix lost some and Linux increased in sales. That's dollars and cents not usage.
With all of the free solaris downloads, linux downloads, and BSD downloads it's no suprise that unix purchases are going down. Why pay for it if you can get it free?
Re:How long (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you work in a large bureaucracy, it's often a lot easier to order a known item that's been through the process of getting on the approved list than to ask for the cheaper item that hasn't.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would a market share report, whose audience is investors, want to report on that?
Sure, Unix boxes last longer... plenty of studies have established that... but these people are tracking sales figures.
Re:Sheer number of small servers (Score:3, Insightful)
I've since stopped even trying to fight for "two things on one server". I've just seen them fall over dead too many times because of a crappy application. Simple upgrades become a nightmare when one application needs one thing, and the other wants a different version.
The FreeBSD/Linux boxes on the network do a TON of different things, and only require different boxes if they are in different physical locations, or the application scales past one smaller server. As I've said many times before, MS's biggest friend and worst enemy are all of these crappy software solutions that require Windows.
Re:inevitable rise (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the *nix world concentrates on Internet hosting and Enterprise Applications (Java/Oracle/etc).In most cases Windows servers don't even compete with Unix servers because the strength of the application-set is almost entirely different. Many or even most companies actually buy both, depending on their needs (shocker!)
Novell is really the only straight-on competitor to MS, and they've been fading for some time, and haven't totally positioned SUSE as a NetWare replacement (yet).
That is a damn good benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
Business is competitive. You can't expect companies to want to pay more than they have to.
It's the latter. Cue apathy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux isn't counted in there, it's recorded separately. But even recorded separately, and marked only by hardware sales dollars (not the most flattering number to use, for a FREE operating system that runs on almost anything), it comes in third. So if you bought a server that came bundled with a Windows license, but then installed Linux on it, it's counted as a "Windows sale." The only things, I think, that are being counted are actual "Linux servers," like you can buy from Dell or IBM.
So I think the picture this paints is pretty good for free software. Bad for proprietary Unix vendors, but the writing's been on the wall for a while, guys. Hope you cashed out your options when the going was good.
The growth in Windows servers is unfortunate but expected, as more people want to start doing
Re:Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
and what rights would those be?
No, this is the reason for the shift (Score:5, Insightful)
You know whose lunch Linux has been eating? Solaris's. AIX's. HP/UX's.
You know how much a typical Solaris deployment with commercial servers would have cost? Right. $$$.
You know how much a typical *Linux* server costs? Right. In most cases, nothing. Sure, you can get Red Hat Enterprise and use a commercial Apache replacement and a commercial ssh, but that isn't what most Linux servers I'm aware of are running.
This has been making the dollar size of the market drop like a stone. That says nothing about amount of deployments. That just says that Sun and friends are bringing a lot less money home than they used to, and it's staying with the people who are using the servers.
"Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS"? Hardly. "Windows Bumps Unix as Most Expensive Server OS", perhaps.
Re:not momentum (Score:3, Insightful)
(a) Did you miss the memo? It's 2006 now.
(b) Anybody who installs XP on FAT deserves to be shot. There's been no good reason to use anything but NTFS in Windows since 1999.
(c) FAT supports long filenames anyway. No application written since 1995 is even going to look for truncated filenames.
In fact, if I remember correctly, I think that even when you install XP on a NTFS filesystem, the operative system generates automatically truncated filenames, even if just to preserve compatibility with old msdos apps (which work under a emulated environment in xp, but they still need to be able to use the available files and directories in the filesystem)
So either you don't use microsoft operative systems, or you don't use them beyond of IE and explorer.exe
The only way I can get that statement to make any sense at all is if I assume that you are under the impression that the only programs that exist for Microsoft operating systems are IE, Explorer, and MS-DOS applications.
I personally have been running Win2k since 1999, and the only times I have used truncated filenames in that time have been when I'm ssh'ing in from a Linux box and can't be bothered to figure out how to tweak the quoting so that the Unix shell will cope with the spaces in my paths.
Re:Ballmer's Comments on the issue... (Score:3, Insightful)
It had:
Fine grained user security (far better than rwx)
Easy and powerful groups
Cheap hardware (ever price an SGI department server?)
Real-time compression
Easy transition for Mac and Windows people. (A lot easier than Irix, at least)
We ran Hummingbird for the Unix/WAIS/Gopher/Archie stuff, used a domain for the 15 Win 3.11 machines and 3.51 for a couple workstations and a server. Overall, people loved it. It also saved something around 8k per desk or so.
Now however, I think Windows has fallen from the core ideals. I would love to be a windows admin if things worked as advertised. Unfortunately, they don't. The long-standing issues with using more than 4GBs of RAM, the IIS instability, the viruses, the bundling IE with the server, and the processor limits have driven it to a desktop land. In a world where Unix can address 200-300 GBs of RAM in a server, but Windows can't even get 64bit out there consistently the sales numbers really don't matter.
-WS
in other news (Score:3, Insightful)
(sigh)