The Empire (No Longer) Strikes Back

One of the most worrying moments in recent open source history was when it became clear that Microsoft was determined to wrench away Apache's crown as top Web server. This began in early 2006, and was soon showing dramatic results, as the April 2006 Netcraft survey commented:

This month's survey brings one of the largest one-month swings in the history of the web server market, as Microsoft gains 4.7 percent share while Apache loses 5.9 percent. The shift is driven by changes at domain registrar Go Daddy, which has just migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Go Daddy, which had been the world's largest Linux host, is now the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host, as measured by hostnames. The company said it will shift a total of 4.4 million hostnames to Windows Server 2003.

This was a staggering shift, and I feared it might presage a real effort by Microsoft to achieve a major PR win. Things reached their nadir in September 2007:

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server.

At that time, the gap between Apache and Microsoft's IIS was just 15%, down, from 50% just a couple of years earlier.

But since then, Apache has gradually pulled ahead; today the gap is around 18% - still far smaller than it once was, but increasing. I feel that the danger has passed, not least because Microsoft has realised that it was fighting yesterday's battles.

Tomorrow's fight will be about owning the cloud, and the main threat there is not so much Apache, as customised versions of open source software, of the kind employed by Google for its vast server farms: in the latest Netscape survey, Google has around 5% of the Web server market. It's still open vs. closed, but not as we know it.

The crucial point is that Microsoft failed to displace Apache, despite its almost limitless resources. This is the crucial lesson for the future, more important than any particular percentage market share: that Microsoft's attacks can - and have been - beaten off.

Now, That's What I Call a Monoculture

Apparently, Internet Explorer has a market share of around 98.7% in South Korea. As I understand it, this is largely because the South Korean government is even more benighted than the UK one, and insists on using ActiveX controls for its dealings with the public. More figures and explanation here.

How Closed Does Nvida Want to Be?

Nvidia is going to lose gobs and gobs of market share this year. They are effectively out of notebooks, will lose the high end in days, don't have anything close to a competitive line-up, have higher costs than ATI, and have to shell out money to keep partners alive. If you think this is bad, wait a little.

Not so much staying closed, as closing down....

Fool Britannia: Why Aren't We Using Firefox?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Firefox By Numbers

* We think there are at least 125,000,000 Firefox users in the world right now, give or take. That represents a doubling since Firefox 2 was released a little over a year ago, and significant growth in every country.
* At Mozilla we view market share as an important quantitative metric that can help us ask smarter questions and build better products, but it’s only one of many
* We have systems here that tell us approximate number of daily users, and use that information to inform much of what we do.

The rest of this interesting post from John Lilly, COO of Mozilla, explains the reasoning behind that number, and also offers some insight into what the Mozilla team are thinking these days. (Via Asa Dotzler.)

Firefox Fights On

Everybody knows that Firefox is one of open source's biggest success stories. What many may not know is that the story is not over:

OneStat.com (www.onestat.com), the number one provider of real-time web analytics, today reported that the global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is 12.72 percent. The global usage share increased 1.03 percent since January 2007. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 has a global usage share of 11.48 percent.

This is really significant, because it suggests that Firefox's rise is not simply a question of hardcore free software supporters switching, but rather a sustained move by some general users too. The question is, how long will it go on? (Via Tuxmachines.org.)

OOo: Just Look at that Stat

I quite often flag up big wins for OpenOffice.org, but it can be hard to get the big picture from these small pieces. That makes this wiki page particularly useful, since it pulls together all of the high-profile OOo projects, together with number of desktops involved, and links to original sources. Very handy. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

Warming Up Nicely with Firefox

Although it's hard to tell from this singularly unhelpful graph, Firefox continues to storm away. According to these figures, it has notched up 12.46% market share.

But perhaps what is most significant is the non-Microsoft figure, now at 17.90%. This represents the percentage of the Web browser market that Microsoft does not control; I predict that once it gets to, say, 20%, then things will really start warming up as just about everyone realises that coding for the non-standard IE only is no longer an option (who wants to lose 20% of the potential audience?).