Linux server market share plummeting

On Friday, October 26th 2007 at 11:27 PM

By Andrew Pociu (View Profile)

Back in 2000, the server market share of the Windows OS stood at approximately 50%, with Unix and Netware at 17% each, and Linux at about 20%. In the following years, numerous servers migrated from Unix to Linux, thus increasing Linux's success over the server market with a peak growth of about 45% in 2003. However after Microsoft released Windows Server 2003, and most of the Unix to Linux migration has been completed, Linux started losing market share, and fast. The 45% growth from 2003 turned into a 10% growth in 2006, and thus today Windows Server stands at 70% of the server market, Linux at less than 20%, Unix at below 10%, and Netware close to nothing.

The industry observers speculate on the many possible causes responsible for the rapid decrease of Linux's market share. Starting with Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Server 2003 a secure server operating system and the spread of ASP.NET 2.0 to Linux not addressing a broad number of needs for server consumers like Windows does. However, most seem to agree that the main reason is the migration of Unix software to Linux, which is nearly complete. All the Unix servers that could easily be migrated to Linux, have already been migrated. The ones left run applications that cannot easily be converted to run on Linux.