14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is literally breathing down Apache's neck. The Redmond company is on an excellent ascendant trend with its web server business, increasing its market share month after month. The Redmond company's climb started strong back in 2005-2006 from the position of the underdog. Approximately two years ago Microsoft's slice of the web server market was six times smaller than Apache's. Continually gaining ground, Microsoft is now challenging Apache's leadership position.
"In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position," revealed Netcraft in its monthly survey for web server market share.
Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS are all on the increase. And by the current market tendencies, Netcraft approximates that Microsoft will catch up with Apache sometime in 2008. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's success can be actually measured by the performances of the Windows Server 2003 operating system and IIS7. In this context, Microsoft can only grow as the company is scheduled to make available Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 at the end of February 2008.
"The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache's market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent," Netcraft added.