Re:Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists
by btilly on Friday October 16, 2009 @10:18PM
(#886525)
Won the server markets? According to http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_s... Microsoft is a solid #2 but Apache serves more than half of all domains, and more than half of the top million domains. It doesn't look like Microsoft won the server to me!
That said, I don't know what would have happened without the monopoly abuse. Open source makes enough sense that it could have done well. However the meteoric rise in open source happened in large part because the whole industry was willing to do anything to make Microsoft lose. That is why everyone jumped on open source the second it became clear that Microsoft would be unable to retaliate for a bit.
Therefore I suspect that open source would have eventually succeeded, but not as fast, and likely not in webserving.
That said, I don't know what would have happened without the monopoly abuse. Open source makes enough sense that it could have done well. However the meteoric rise in open source happened in large part because the whole industry was willing to do anything to make Microsoft lose. That is why everyone jumped on open source the second it became clear that Microsoft would be unable to retaliate for a bit.
Therefore I suspect that open source would have eventually succeeded, but not as fast, and likely not in webserving.