[SGVLUG] Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality

[Dustin]

On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> Are you sure about that Dustin?  Yes we in the open source community 
> like to recount the statistics from netcraft, but here are two things to 
> refute that:

>From the standpoint of what really matters, the fact that you can use
pretty much everything on the web with Firefox on Linux, or Safari on OS
X, is proof enough that Microsoft failed, because there is no doubt about
their intentions.  My wife has to use IE to fill out her timecard, because
it uses ActiveX.  That is what Microsoft planned for the web to become.
The fact that visiting that one internal server is the only time she ever
needs to use IE means we won. Everything else is quantizing that victory.

I don't collect statistics to offer instead of netcraft's, but if we're
listing bullet points here are some:

* My understanding is that quite a lot of Windows servers are in fact
  running some version of Apache, so they would count as far as this 
  particular issue goes.

* 70% leaves a comfortable margin for error.

* The trend is more useful than the numbers, and the trend is pretty good.

* I suspect better statistics in counting servers wouldn't actually
  improve the relevance of the numbers at all.  The parameter of interest
  should be weighted by some appropriate function (not necessarily linear)
  of traffic, because a lot of low-use servers really don't matter as much
  as one very busy server.  I'd guess that non-IIS use is correlated with
  large, high-traffic sites.  It's OK if mom-n-pop stores don't know how
  to do anything but turn the switch on a MS-Windows Server if Google is
  running Linux and Yahoo is running FreeBSD.

* All the sites using IIS but serving up standards-compliant (or at least 
  non-compliant pages of the ordinary kind the browsers all handle) pages 
  are not entirely a bad thing for us--it shows some strength in the
  standards when they are not mandated by the software.

* It didn't hurt us that Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with 
  security nightmares like ActiveX. :-)

Anyway, I'll take Netcraft's statistics over Microsoft's
bought-and-paid-for independent studies any day.  More worrisome is the
popularity of flash animation, which is closer to damaging the core
concept of the first two W's in WWW than Microsoft ever came.  This is
where Microsoft's win on the client side really hurts us--once they
defeated Netscape they put on the brakes, because improving the Web
platform was the very last thing they wanted to happen.  What good is an
alternative technology like SVG if Microsoft has disbanded the IE
developer team and won't support any new standards?  That is why Firefox
and the other standards-compliant browsers (actually, probably any browser
but IE, including proprietary ones like Opera and Safari) are important
all out of proportion to their userbase.  The IE team has been 
re-constituted, and IE is going to inch at least a little bit closer to 
the '90s. :-)

Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, I wonder what that will do to the
availability of the Linux flash plugin and the (currently non-existent)  
Linux shockwave plugin?

Chris Smith must have some interesting comments on this topic, given where 
he works.

Dustin