Windows bumps Unix as top server OS
Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 21 February 2006
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report.
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
And here's where I stop reading the article. If you rank operating systems by the sales, MS has of course a high chance to win. Compared to free systems, like Linux, BSD and Solaris, that's quite easy. They need to compare usage, not sales (for example 68.01% Apache vs 20.56% IIS).