Glyn,

Over the years I have heard from people, including Web hosts, that were offered 'freebies' to choose Microsoft. Even HPC is includedm here. A Microsoft momentum is affecting morale and perception (never mind "Get the Facts"), so it's important. Have a look at this new interview.

Cringely the Unemployable on the fallacy of Web 2.0, Microsoft ruthlessness, and the CB radio of our decade

,----[ Quote ]
| Davidson: Which software company would you hate to compete against? What
| makes you single them out?
|
| Cringely: Microsoft of course. They have the deepest of pockets, unlimited
| ambition, and they are willing to lose money for years and years just to make
| sure that you don't make any money, either. And they are mean, REALLY mean.
|
| Davidson: Why do you think Microsoft is mean? Are you implying some kind of
| malicious intent rather than just ruthlessness?
|
| Cringely: Maybe "mean" is the wrong word to use for Microsoft. "Ruthless" is
| good. The company is built in the image of Bill Gates and Bill is a guy who
| gets caught-up in the game of business and doesn't typically see its personal
| cost. To use what might seem to be an obscure example, just look at all the
| various partnerships and industry consortia that Microsoft has announced
| through the years that never produced a product or even a usable
| specification. There have been literally dozens of these operations that are
| intended solely to freeze the competition until Microsoft can figure what the
| heck it actually wants to do. To Microsoft its a PR exercise that helps them
| compete but to customers it is just a damned lie. That's ruthless. There are
| plenty of other examples I can give but you get the point. I represent the
| concerns of users, not vendors, and Microsoft doesn't really care about
| users.
`----

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html

See the part about tolerating losses just in order to monopolise and then elevate prices? Intel and Microsoft were accused of doing the same thing to sabotage the not-for-profit OLPC project. Classmate was offered for a loss and $3 Windows/Office got introduced. I have a lot of proof (articles) to show this.

If this is another example of the technical case of "dumping", this might actually be illegal.

this is the perfect motive for revolution in the FOSS server sector, since features M$ offer are actually gaining ground for ease of use and countless features people find interesting, yet slow page rendering to a crawl even with multi-megabit internet connection. COME ON APACHE, now is the perfect reason to pull your stable and fast web server into the 20XX years with features and little sly tweaks that can of course beat M$ at its game. It isn't like it's impossible, apache is still whooping IIS BUT as more *average* individuals just find it cool to start up a server, the sad fact is the desktop share is in the M$ field of play, so as more in that group run servers blindly, of course its share shall rise.
I'm only hoping apache can go ahead and build a completely new base from code they already have that's made them so good and in 1st place for a while, but just add current/modern technologies, philosophy, and mindset to their product to create what users WANT to run over their native OS's server platform.

I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT APACHE, GITERDUN!!!! ;)

Glyn,

Lets be careful here. Going back to the Netcraft survey take a look at the approximate dates of when the Microsoft rise increased -- around July 2006. So what happened that is related to that rise? How about the introduction of Sharepoint and Microsoft's intro into live business services, both of which depend on IIS as a core component of the offerings. And especially for the live offering is it appropriate for Netcraft to be counting the IIS numbers from the very service provider that wrote the code? Developers chose Apache for a reason. A MS support person has no choice but to load IIS on a MS box. Not quite the same don't you agree?

So how does that relate to the Netcraft survey? Well for one IIS is not so much winning as is the Sharepoint CMS. The IIS count is along for the ride. It probably also points out that MS must be cutting deals to forego CAL licensing. Anybody using Sharepoint for a net presence might be in for a very rude price shock as far as the CALs go unless they have a get out of jail free card from MS.

Which brings me to my final observation. Times have changed, it is no longer just a world of static pages and a web server that matters now. It's some form of Zope/Sharepoint/PlOne/Django engine that is the driving commodity now. And some of those I just listed do not even use a web server but provide their own internally. So maybe Netcraft needs to do the same thing for web server for CMS families.