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Market Share: Who Uses What?

For years, Internet servers have been running UNIX almost exclusively. Again, this is because it is available for just about every type of hardware and there is a large base of knowledgeable UNIX administrators, installers, and programmers-more so than any other operating system. In addition, UNIX is the basis of the beginnings of the Internet.

However, recently, while the cost of technology has been continually decreasing, there has been a consistent increase in the use of easy-to-use graphics-based operating systems. These are highlighted by MacOS and Windows NT, which have been growing faster than any other operating system but still lag far behind Solaris and UNIX. The capabilities of these newer operating systems have been growing to the point that the current release of Windows NT can handle the same loads that were previously only handled under UNIX. However, as you can see in Figure 7.6, Sun Solaris has by far the largest market of Internet servers. Over the next few years, expect to see the difference between the top three or four operating systems narrow as features and benefits become similar among the operating systems and in-house knowledge becomes a larger factor in selecting the operating system.

Figure 7.6: Operating system market share according to a 1995 Internet site survey.

This Internet site survey was created by Jim Fetters of Arizona State University and administered between April and August 1995; it included more than 600 responses. The 1996 version of this survey currently is underway and should be available at http://www.mirai.com by the time this book is published.

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