Month: February 2006

I find this report very hard to believe and the results must be seriously skewed somehow, but IDC have a report called Server Watch, which apparently shows Windows server boxes outselling Unix boxes in 2005 (by $17.7bn to $17.5bn).

Not unexpectedly, in terms of web server software market share Apache still dominates the market running on more than 3 times as many web servers as Microsoft IIS, has has done so consistently since the mid 90’s with no signs of Microsoft even getting close. Although this server survey is just a web server survey, this makes me question the usefulness of IDC’s report of server sales – does this include various Linux flavours, and since being free, are they included in IDC’s report? Probably not. So in terms of sales Windows servers may be leading Unix, but in terms of installations I have no doubt that there are more Unix based server installations in the wild than there are Windows, and I doubt even Microsoft would argue with that.

With Oracle’s recent purchase of Sleepycat, developer of the Berkeley DB engine used with MySQL, and last year of InnoDB, MySQL is left without a transactional database engine. MySQL supports plugable engines for it’s file storage, and the two that support transactions and the typical ACID properties have both been bought by Oracle. The remaining engines such as MyISAM do not support transactions.

Long term what does this mean for MySQL? The MySQL user conference is in April this year, so it will be interesting to hear from the source what the long term strategy is for the product.

News.com have a speculative article with info from analysts estimating the component cost to Sony when they ship the long awaited PS3 console. So far the estimate is around $800-$900. Depending on the street price when they launch, which is expected to be much less than the cost, but still somewhere around $500-$600, each sale of the console will be a large loss for Sony.

Why can they plan to sell each console for such a loss? Sales from games and licensing is the major income source, not the actual hardware itself. Sony has played this game before with the previous Playstation consoles, as has Microsoft with their XBox console launches.

According to some sources like this article on gameshout.com, Sony is still committed to a Spring 2006 launch desipite all the noise and rumours that the launch is delayed for as much as a year. This article says Sony will launch with or without game titles from 3rd party developers (who have said they are not ready for a Spring launch), as Sony’s titles are apparently complete and ready to go. Time will tell…