Ellison Opens His Mouth
"(04/03/03)—At a gathering of current and potential Oracle Corp. ISV (independent software vendor) partners in New York this week, Oracle Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison extolled the virtues of Linux and predicted that the open-source operating system will soon decimate Microsoft Corp. in the battle for the data center market.
"(Microsoft has) already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance," Ellison said, speaking of the Apache Web server's displacement of Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) technology. "They had a virtual monopoly on Web servers, and then they were wiped off the face of the earth. And it's going to happen to them again on Linux."
Ellison's version of Web server history is a bit shaky, though, according to research and services company Netcraft Inc. The company's survey of Web server market share shows Apache already heading toward a leading market position by the time IIS appeared on the field in 1996. Although IIS is currently the No. 2 Web server technology, behind Apache, it never gained more than a 35 percent market share, according to Netcraft, which tracks IIS's current market share at about 30 percent."
Amazing how little CEOs of certain companies seem to know about the real world... I often wonder if they really believe what they are saying or if they are knowingly distributing this blatantly erroneous propaganda. Maybe we should just call them "Information Ministers" instead...
[1] Iraq denies reports on significant US advance towards Baghdad
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=246078&lang=e&dir=news