posted by steve | Category: Microsoft & Closed Source |

A headline around the Internets today read “Firefox Growth Slowing”. Here’s a link to one of the articles.

This headline got me thinking about another product with slow, actually almost no growth, namely Microsoft’s IIS web server. The IIS web server enjoys only about a 20% market share according to Netcraft’s Web Server Survey. This share is hardly increasing at all, and in fact has decreased in previous months.

To be fair, Apache’s web server, which holds a nearly 70% market share hasn’t seen much by way of growth either. However, I’m curious why the media hasn’t picked up on the non-existent growth and small market share of IIS compared to Apache.

Why doesn’t IIS have more market share? From everything I read it seems like IIS would be the key player in the web server market but that’s simply not the case. Obvious reasons include the never-ending stream of IIS exploits over the past few years along with Microsoft’s abysmal job of security in general.

I’d like to see a headline in something more than my blog stating something like: “Microsoft IIS Web Server Can’t Break 20% Market Share”.