Summary: Microsoft's market share in servers is said to have slid to 1997 levels

FOLLOWING its malicious attack on Yahoo!, Microsoft became best evidence of its own demise on the Web. It no longer sought to create compelling products and make these available; instead, Microsoft tried to derail its competitors, preferably stealing their customers in the process. Once they got some crony installed, everything Yahoo! had which was of value to Microsoft got passed to Microsoft or put under the leadership of former Microsoft executives. According to this bit of news, Yahoo! is already well too infected by the Microsoft virus. "MALWARE DISTRIBUTORS have managed to get their rogue ads displayed on Bing and Yahoo when users search for popular software downloads," says The Inquirer. "Since these ads always appear at the top of the page before the actual search results, and since the rogue websites they point to are near perfect copies of the real ones, the attack most likely has a high infection rate."

This is why it's good to limit Microsoft's presence on the Web. It is nothing but trouble. In other interesting news, "Microsoft’s web server is losing ground" to the point where even Netcraft's flawed statistics show Microsoft approaching single-digit market share. To quote:

Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground. It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

In reality, based on the claims of some people, Microsoft's real IIS market share was somewhere around 12%, whereas Apache and GNU/Linux market share in this area were all along impressive. In September 2008 Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that “[f]orty percent of servers run Windows," but he probably used flawed measures/methods. He would only wish for such a high market share. Where servers are concerned, Microsoft may be making money, but it's not making much an impact. Zero-cost operating systems work a lot better and the Microsoft-taxed distribution, SUSE, is still niche product (for Microsoft lovers such as SAP). ⬆