I call bullshit on IDC's figures. If you take public-facing websites -- something that can be checked -- MS has a 20% market share[1]. Some of these are multiple sites on one server, and some are multiple servers on one site, which probably cancel each other out so c.286M sites is roughly the same number of servers.
By contrast, IDC's figures are for a total of less than 2M servers sold per quarter. If each server lasts for 5 years, that means there are a total of 40M in use worldwide, which is way too low.
I don't see Linux share on that? I ask because we use Apache on WS08. I'm sure we're not the common case, but it would be useful to know if Apache==99% Linux or 75% Linux.
Taking a double digit percentage of a proprietary juggernaut's market with something free is what I'd count as clobbering.
That report also seems to cover shipments, as in prefab servers with the OS already installed. Don't most larger operations use homemade distributions and configurations? That's on top of any number of spawned instances of Linux in a virtualized environment. I wonder how many Linux instances are running on EC2 at any given time.
I don't see anything in the IDC report about overall OS share. Just shipments. A computerworld blog referencing a zdnet blog (which also cites the IDC report) for marketshare numbers seems fishy, as though they were fudging facts to support a headline.
By contrast, IDC's figures are for a total of less than 2M servers sold per quarter. If each server lasts for 5 years, that means there are a total of 40M in use worldwide, which is way too low.
1. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/02/15/february-2011-w...