Firefox May Soon Overtake IE In Europe 290
peterkern writes "The July browser market share reports are somewhat inconsistent, but if we believe StatCounter, then it looks like Firefox will be overtaking Microsoft IE's market share next month. The two browsers are both within 1 point of 40% market share, IE above and Firefox below. Europeans are more crazy about Firefox than Americans: In Germany, Firefox has a 61% market share, while IE has only 25%. Google Chrome is, according to StatCounter, now above 10%. ConceivablyTech has more details, including market share data from both StatCounter and Net Applications (which as of this month is limiting its free data)."
Re:Take a walk, Ballmer (Score:4, Interesting)
What you point out is niche markets for MS. The core business is still office, followed by the OS. The xbox is also coming around slowly, if I remember correctly it is even starting to make back its investment, though at the current rate it'll be a century or two before it breaks even.
When some other office suit tops 50% market share, that is when the Microsoft ship starts sinking. And, as it goes with ships, once it starts sinking, the rest goes fairly quickly. Losing the document format lock-in would put a huge hole in the hull. Browsers, music format, smart phones - all that stuff is just water that's come over the railing. It sucks, but it doesn't endanger the ship.
As for Balmer - MS had already lost its edge when he took over. I'm quite sure he becoming the fallboy was part of the deal. Does anyone here really think Gates stepped down because he didn't like being boss anymore? He stepped down because he knew that the star was fading, and he had to build an image seperate from MS or he'd go down with it. All the good that the Gates Foundation does has the purpose of washing his image clean. Even that idea is stolen from the robber barons. (note that I don't want to diminish the good the foundation does. I just point out it's not pure altruism but has a purpose.)
Re:companies (Score:3, Interesting)
Forced Browser Choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be highly related to the fact that in Europe, as part of an anti-trust settlement, when you first log into a new Windows machine you are presented with a choice of internet browsers [microsoft.com] and no longer default to MSIE?
Re:Opposite world wide trend? (Score:4, Interesting)
A CEO is looking for a new CFO for his company. He invites an engineer, a mathematician and a statistician for a group interview. The CEO asks, "How much is two plus two?" The engineer pulls out his calculator, punches it in, and says, "Four!"
The mathematician goes to the whiteboard, and scribbles down a proof, and says, "This proves that two plus two is four!"
The statistician, leans forward to the CEO, and whispers, "How much do you want two plus two to be?"
Microsolt, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Dell, HP, SAP etc. all do this: They will create a different definition for what comprises their market, and then they all claim to be the market leader.
Mod parent up please (Score:2, Interesting)
Oracle is seriously screiny us around as well.
I hate to say this but DB2 looks more attractive from a pricing point of view every day.
That coupled with the insance price increases in WebLogic and Solaris, makes us seriously consider not buying anything more from Oracle/BEA/Sun.
We are already moving many critical systems to Linux on X86-64 Blades (Currently HP but maybe IBM in the future).
Oracle don't give a toss. All they want is more and more every month.
Re:Take a walk, Ballmer (Score:5, Interesting)
What planet are you on? .Net is big and getting bigger every year
in terms of 000,000's spent - J2EE massively outweighs .NET. I work in large enterprise systems delivery and the few financial orgs that went for .NET for truly resilient financial systems have moved away. .NET is used in places for presentation tier front end for web services but not a lot else.
The london stock exchange problems with tradelect (see article here [computerworld.com]) demonstrated that even a well funded and supported closely by top MS engineers and consultants - the system could not scale or perform to enterprise standards. This sent a real message across the financial industry (here in the UK) with many architects shunning MS. I also had to do the same when my client, a large life assurer, is having to spend over £10m to replace a perfectly functioning MS VB6/ASP sales platform because there is no upgrade path to .NET and the windows 2003 systems that it uses will go out of support soon. The last thing we're going to do is give more business to MS - so it is currently being replaced with services on an open source ESB platform (with paid support of course). The IT people here have a hard time explaining to the business why we need to spend so much money to get no new business functionality.
Re:Browser market share (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes but the point is, there are now sufficient users running browsers other than IE that you have to develop for them...
The funny thing is that when Firefox had a similar market share to what IE6 has now, lots of sites said "screw it, this site only works in Internet Explorer". Adding support for Firefox was easy; just write a reasonably standards-compliant site and it looked ok in Firefox. Now developers have a much harder job trying to make sites work in IE6, yet you rarely see sites just rejecting it.
I still find the occasional site telling me I have an unsupported browser (Yahoo is one of them, which is pretty hilarious in 2010). HP blade enclosures "support" Firefox by asking you to install the IE tab extension.
Re:Take a walk, Ballmer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Browser market share (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it that a bewildering number of smart people has been indoctrinated into believing that the "free market" is the only solution to everything?
If the cost benefit ratio is less for a market-based solution compared to an alternative solution, then maybe it's time to go with the alternative.
By all metrics, the US healthcare system is delivering comparable medical outcomes to other industrialized nations at about 2 times the cost.
It is beyond debate that a completely laissez faire approach to markets ultimately leads to distortions that prevent efficient resource distribution in most (if not all) sectors of the economy. The is just no reason to object based on the facts, yet people still object. Funny this ideology thing.....
And MSSQL is a real contender too (Score:3, Interesting)
You can get some amazingly high end MSSQL servers these days. I've never had occasion but I do have a couple friend who work at places that do. You can get an HP Superdome 2 with 2TB of RAM and MSSQL will use it, given a large enough database. When you get the Datacenter versions of Windows and SQL Server you find that it has all the heavy hitting features you expect from a high end database. It scales to obscene levels and can handle massive reliability requirements.
I'm told that Oracle can go further still... But then how many people need that? For most people, even though with very high end needs, MSSQL is a real contender. Nobody is going to call it cheap, but then it is cheaper than Oracle and MS doesn't fuck you on pricing or support. You pay a hefty fee for Windows and MSSQL, but that's all you have to pay and you are guaranteed updates for a certain period of time, which they may choose to extend (Windows is generally supported for 10 years minimum from release, SQL server for 9 years).
Of course as you noted there's also DB2, and for lower end applications free stuff like MySQL and Postgres.
Have you ever set up a transparent proxy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you ever set up a transparent proxy? No need to configure each machine individually. Just all port 80 traffic is routed through to your proxy.
Such work is simplicity itself as well: set up your DHCP to return a set of variable/value pairs and you can set your network however you want.
NOTHING to configure for each installation. Just set your server with the right rules.
AD server is a hammer looking for a nail. And you're getting screwed.
Re:Take a walk, Ballmer (Score:3, Interesting)
--Coder