01.29.21
The Fall of Microsoft’s IIS and Microsoft’s Faked ‘Love’ of What’s Defeating IIS and Windows
Summary: Looking at the raw figures, courtesy of Netcraft (which has long tracked those sorts of things), it seems abundantly clear that IIS will be abandoned sooner or later and in order to still seem relevant Microsoft pretends that it “loves” (i.e. wishes to control) what’s rapidly replacing it
THE VIDEO above deals with a subject long explored here, more so during the first lock-down (spring of 2020). Many companies, with their staff working ‘offsite’, seem to have moved off Microsoft/IIS, belatedly saving money and improving reliability/availability/uptime.
“It’s getting rather difficult to name any high-profile sites that still (in 2021) run IIS.”Let’s face it: no solid CMS exists for or is being actively maintained/developed for Microsoft frameworks. When it comes to Web servers, Microsoft long ago lost the fight. Some estimates we saw earlier this week said GNU/Linux has 90% or more of this market. Much of the rest is probably BSD or some UNIX that needs replacing (because it’s severely outdated).
When it comes to active sites (what actually matters), Microsoft’s share is becoming rather miniscule and that number is probably a lot lower if one considers top sites (e.g. as measured in terms of reach/traffic). It’s getting rather difficult to name any high-profile sites that still (in 2021) run IIS.
So, Microsoft’s IIS share (active sites) has collapsed another 4 percent in just one month. One month. This is part of an ongoing trend which further sped up or accelerated during the pandemic. While Microsoft makes claims and allusions to “Clown Computing” (to pretend there is growth by reclassifying old stuff) the matter of fact is that there are many layoffs and issues. They're going nowhere fast.
From the latest survey of servers:
Microsoft observed the largest drop of 2.2 million domains, while nginx and Apache lost 903,000 and 303,000. This resulted in a small loss of market share for all three, the largest drop being seen by Microsoft which fell 0.8 percentage points to 6.3%.
Steve Ballmer, back in September 2008, said that “[f]orty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux…”
He probably meant Web servers. Well, right now Microsoft is somewhere near a tenth of that. At this point it becomes almost financially un-viable to carry on. The costs of maintaining this thing likely outweigh/surpass the gains/income.
Maybe one day in the future Microsoft will put IIS in some “Arctic Vault” somewhere. But of course IIS is proprietary software, i.e. secret code, pretty much like everything else of any significance, contrary to the false narrative of Microsoft becoming “open” (e.g. by buying a proprietary prison that besieges Free software, namely proprietary GitHub). █
“Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s good that we have museums to document them.”
–Bill Gates March 10th, 2005
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