[meaty]

Perhaps us .Net devs are the silent majority?

Windows pays the bills for a lot of people.

One of our clients has 17,000 windows desktops, 3,500 windows laptops, 500 windows servers and a team of 80 people looking after it all. None of this is connected to the internet or is tongue-wagged about profusely. There are thousands of companies that size hiding that no one hears about here be use they are not clever, vc funded or bleeding edge.

The world is built on lots of things, but a chunk of it certainly is built on windows, possibly more than you can see with the naked eye.

[mythz]

No not silent majority, not even close. Naming a single instance is not representative of the real-world at all. Unfortunately Amazon/Azure are coy with their numbers but I expect there is likely an order of magnitude more instances deployed on Amazon than Azure.

Some rough numbers to provide some meaningful context of Microsoft's overall server market share:

Microsoft only has 11.62% of the total web server market share of active sites, 12.86% activity from the top 100M busiest sites: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/03/01/march-2013-web-...

Only a fraction of the top internet sites are deployed on a Microsoft platform: http://www.seomoz.org/top500

C# (the most popular .NET language) is the 12th most popular language on GitHub: https://github.com/languages/C%23

[nikcub]

You are sampling outside of Microsoft's market. For eg.

* Instead of GitHub they use Codeplex [0]

* Instead of web servers they sell network servers, a much larger market. Windows still holds 73% of this market, and growing. It is worth $20B a year and is much larger than the web server market [1]

* Outlook is still the most popular mail client in the world (27%)

* Office is Office, one of the most profitable business units in the world

* 550M PC's are sold each year and 85% of them run Windows

* Still 39% of the browser market [3]

* There are Microsoft clients in the Fortune 100-500 that store more data than the entire public internet (taken as being 5 petabytes - most investment banks store data in petabyte scale)

* Visual Studio is not only the most popular IDE, but also the highest selling and grossing [4]

Your data points are based on open source and web servers, which are only a tiny fraction of the total computing and networking market. It is the remainder of that market where Microsoft dominates. I don't think they are even going to pretend to attempt to infiltrate that market, they have a much larger market to defend.

I don't work within the Microsoft ecosystem any longer, but I did for over a decade. I agree with OP that Azure will win, all of my Microsoft development and admin friends are raving about it and moving their clients/organizations onto it.

[0] http://codeplex.org

[1] http://blogs.computerworld.com/16263/windows_widens_lead_ove...

[3] http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/web-brow...

[4] http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3616626/Whats+...

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Instead of GitHub they use Codeplex

The .Net devs that I know all use github, not codeplex. Is there any data behind this? Both are in use (and others), but in what proportion?

[gjulianm]

That's not a meaningful context. That web server market share doesn't include all the on-premises servers for Intranets, mail, shared folders... Neither the Github percentage is representative. In fact, when your parent was referring to with 'silent majority' is that those C# projects are not on GitHub, not open source, just internal tools.

I don't say that .NET is a majority, or minority, or whatever. I sincerely don't have the data. But those numbers you gave don't prove anything.

[lambda]

But it is a silent majority. Because the majority of .NET software is not written to be public facing; but rather written for some internal IT need. Everyone who needs some little custom piece of software that will plug their special domain-specific software into their accounting system has it written in .NET.

Yes, Microsoft only has a small fraction of total public webservers. But theres so much that's not public that you don't see.

Github isn't a very good metric; Git is a lot more popular on Mac OS X and Linux than it is on Windows. Furthermore, most of the code written in C# isn't open source, so an open source hosting site isn't a good way to measure it; and the stuff that is, is more often hosted on Codeplex, Microsoft's code hosting site.

[Nursie]

"Because the majority of .NET software is not written to be public facing"

I'd be very surprised if the majority of C software is either. Most C software devs I know have no interest in publishing FOSS, and write software for business use inside enterprises.

I don't think we can really claim to know anything from some stats about web servers or github.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> I'd be very surprised if the majority of C software is either

Or java. Or C++.

[meaty]

That's web sites. That's a fraction of the real world, which is my point. Most businesses don't run over HTTP. If most of the top 500 web sites disappeared, the world wouldn't stop.

GitHub is not a good measure of popularity of a proprietary language mainly aimed at internal and closed source software. In fact, if you added our 4.2mloc of total c# code to githib I reckon the stats would be different.

[mythz]

HTTP-based services and websites is going to be the majority of what services that are going to be hosted on Amazon/Azure.

Yes, many enterprises also makes use of MQ's and NoSQL, which due to their weak offerings and poor positioning is relatively non-existent on Microsoft platforms.

[meaty]

I think you are smoking crack. Our AD is on azure. Its not designed for http specifically. The azure web instances bit is but the whole platform is IaaS style.

So hadoop with SQL server (even ESENT if you want a key-value store) and MSMQ/BizTalk are not used? Only the entire health service in the UK runs on their 'poor offerings'...

Deep sigh. I think there are two views of reality.

[mythz]

If we're going to start sharing personal opinions, I think you're naive, insulated inside a Microsoft bubble and unable to comprehend the written word.

I said "majority" of services going on the cloud will be HTTP-based services - feel free to provide any evidence that contradicts this (and no, "But we host our AD on Azure!" doesn't count). That's also where the most of their Azure marketing efforts are going (which has historically had a strong impact in how .NET devs behave)

I said "relatively non-existent", not that they're not used at all. i.e. MQ's are sparingly used in .NET than say compared to the JVM platform which has a metric ton more quality MQ solutions than what's offered from Microsoft. Also NoSQL is effectively thriving on most other platforms which benefit from active communities and solid language bindings, in contrast, most of .NET still uses SQL Server for most things.

[kayoone]

I think you are the one insulated inside a startup-hiptech-webdev centric bubble which doesnt represent the real world. Almost any buisness that isnt strictly IT focused is running on MS Tech. Not for webservers, but for client pcs and network servers. The entire german healthcare (basically any Hospital, Doctor etc) runs on MS infrastructure and Azure also has benefits for these kind of businesses, far beyond any web related services.

Github and the web development world is a very bad metric to measure this.

[meaty]

Sorry I will be 100% honest - I misread the first paragraph in the last message you posted. My apologies.