The web was built, and runs on, *nix/BSD. Windows is an outlier. Windows can't even get the slashes going the right way. There's a reason 80% of internet traffic does not use Windows.
I also don't think it's strictly true. For sure the underlying networking came from Unix. But as for the web itself, once we got to real dynamic content, it seems to me that Microsoft were the ones that got things moving.
While the Unix world was mired in the awful world of CGI, Microsoft gave us high-performance ISAPI, and then Cold Fusion (also on the Windows platform) and Microsoft's ASP made programming a little more sane. While the Unix world tried to deal with JSP (which IMHO wasn't a very good solution), the Microsoft platform seems to have been the innovators for several years, until Ruby on Rails and then node.js and stuff started coming out.
Today, the Apache server powers far more sites than any other, it's true. But IIS shares the 2nd-place spot [1]. When you say "There's a reason 80% of internet traffic does not use Windows", that's pretty much true for the servers, but far off the mark when counting clients. And the reason for that is that Microsoft's strength hasn't historically been radical advances, but in figuring out ways to take the bleeding edge tech that doesn't really work quite right yet, and packaging it into commodity software that may not be as sexy as envisioned by those with the original ideas, but actually useful to the average guy.
Your examples presume there was something better than CGI at the time and the other products are better than something else. For one, I wouldn't be caught dead using any of the products you mentioned.
You claim IIS by using a ZDNet article from two years ago but the reality is IIS is number three behind Nginx and Apache. Still, being a distant #2 is nothing to brag about.
Now you're trying to claim clients are what powers the web but that's not the topic. What an amateur uses does not define what the professional uses. And to claim not wanting to be on the bleeding edge of things is no excuse for falling behind. Firefox and Chrome knocked IE off its perch years ago by being on the bleeding edge.
Likely more than that seeing as how the majority of the load balancers and many of the routers / switches out there run some form of BSD (netscalar) or Linux (Arista), etc.
CWuestefeld|11 years ago
I also don't think it's strictly true. For sure the underlying networking came from Unix. But as for the web itself, once we got to real dynamic content, it seems to me that Microsoft were the ones that got things moving.
While the Unix world was mired in the awful world of CGI, Microsoft gave us high-performance ISAPI, and then Cold Fusion (also on the Windows platform) and Microsoft's ASP made programming a little more sane. While the Unix world tried to deal with JSP (which IMHO wasn't a very good solution), the Microsoft platform seems to have been the innovators for several years, until Ruby on Rails and then node.js and stuff started coming out.
Today, the Apache server powers far more sites than any other, it's true. But IIS shares the 2nd-place spot [1]. When you say "There's a reason 80% of internet traffic does not use Windows", that's pretty much true for the servers, but far off the mark when counting clients. And the reason for that is that Microsoft's strength hasn't historically been radical advances, but in figuring out ways to take the bleeding edge tech that doesn't really work quite right yet, and packaging it into commodity software that may not be as sexy as envisioned by those with the original ideas, but actually useful to the average guy.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/web-servers-microsoft-iis-and-n...
EDIT - missing word "world" in 3rd para
wantab|11 years ago
You claim IIS by using a ZDNet article from two years ago but the reality is IIS is number three behind Nginx and Apache. Still, being a distant #2 is nothing to brag about.
Now you're trying to claim clients are what powers the web but that's not the topic. What an amateur uses does not define what the professional uses. And to claim not wanting to be on the bleeding edge of things is no excuse for falling behind. Firefox and Chrome knocked IE off its perch years ago by being on the bleeding edge.
SEJeff|11 years ago