Thursday, February 23, 2006

Windows bumps Unix as top server OS

From yesterday's CNet:

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."

That is a very intetesting development. Windows seems to have overcome its traditional reputation of unreliable, or at least it is considered reliable enough. In my experience mainframe and some of the high-end (e.g. Sun) UNIX servers by far dwarf Windows reliability. Linux servers in the corporate environments still seem to struggle; I had many frustrating days at one large Investment Bank with Linux because of unscalable NFS stacks (had to wait until the one-and-only-one NFS developer got back from his summer vacation) and the buggy ClearCase file system port from Solaris. I'm also curious about which version of Windows is the main server environment; win2k was by far the most stable I've dealt with, win XP was a big step backwards in terms of reliability.

I'll blog about the shrink-wrap software market's effect of good enough reliability soon.

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