It won't be financially sustainable for much longer and Microsoft admits to us (in IRC) that there were also Azure layoffs this year (and Azure has just been cracked)

Summary: When it comes to Web servers (World Wide Web as assessed by pertinent sites), Microsoft is already a goner living its last days (months or years)

THROUGHOUT the year we wrote nearly half a dozen posts about IIS, seeing that it's nose-diving in terms of usage during the pandemic (both in absolute and relative terms). According to this latest report, which is the most comprehensive of its kind, only 3.87% of Web sites use Windows/IIS. This share is rapidly declining.

"...the trends are telling... Windows servers are a dying breed."The latest report is, as usual, a bunch of graphs preceded by (foreword with text) explanatory notes. The name Microsoft is repeated at least 3 times and it says "Microsoft lost 14,700 computers". To quote just 3 paragraphs:

Microsoft, Apache and nginx each suffered losses in their total number of domains, although nginx's loss was small enough that its market share increased slightly. 30.3% of the world's domains are now powered by nginx, compared with 26.4% powered by Apache. Despite losses affecting each major webserver vendor, the causes were independent in each case; for example nginx’s 34,000 loss resulting from a drop of 387,000 domains at Freenom.

OpenResty is continuing to show strong growth, with GoDaddy's use of the web server for its parked domains. It now powers 71.3 million sites across 36.9 million domains and 84,680 web-facing computers.

The number of web-facing computers running nginx, Apache and Microsoft web server software also fell this month. The largest loss was 38,600 web-facing computers for nginx, which took its total down to 3.63 million and its share down by 0.33 percentage points to 34.4%, leaving it just over one percentage point ahead of Apache. Microsoft lost 14,700 computers, while Apache lost 5,820.

This is the kind of story that Microsoft-funded (e.g. bribed through ad-buying) corporate media never covers.

Instead, media will talk about "clown" (not servers) and hail it as a revolution like never before -- one that you mustn't miss out on or else you won't be "smart". They give the false impression (delusion/illusion) that Microsoft is at the cutting "edge" of things, the "recency" perception, e.g. having "secure" chips while putting NSA back doors in virtually everything.

As we said earlier this year (when the declines in Microsoft's share were considerably bigger), it won't be long before the cost of maintaining IIS outweighs the financial benefits. That's when Microsoft starts rebranding and speaking about "reorg" (to avoid words like "layoffs" or "product termination").

GNU/Linux and Free/libre Web server software is becoming very dominant; one might say it has become the norm, so all those sites that claim to compare "Windows hosting versus Linux hosting" are terribly outdated because they give the illusion of parity; the trends are telling... Windows servers are a dying breed.

As for Windows in general, it's a mess. Microsoft cannot maintain it anymore, so it breaks itself again. Not that Red Hat or Canonical will take advantage of it to promote GNU/Linux... ⬆