Industry
Internet Service Provision
Monday, July 29, 2002Space, the Final Frontier
The New York Times asks, "Can AOL Keep Its Subscribers in a New World of Broadband?" after noticing thatAmerica Online's subscriber count in the United States grew by only 477,000 in the second quarter, a 7 percent annual rate. A year ago, subscriptions grew by 12 percent; two years ago, the rate was 16 percent.....
America Online now has only a 4 percent share of the 12 million broadband subscribers in the United States.
The way that broadband is deployed limits the growth of all of the parties involved, excepting possibly Earthlink. In order to get a broadband connection you must live in a specific area. The local loop, by and large, is owned by franchisees who do not resell the last mile or so. You buy DOCSIS service from your CATV provider. You buy DSL from your LEC. You buy a satellite earth station from DirecTV and try to figure out how to get it to transmit upstream. Except in the latter case, you have to move to change providers. Which means, the provider's growth is limited by geography.
To grow, they have to expand the region in which they have local monopolies; that is, they must merge.
The only way to avoid this constraint on growth is to separate the connection provided from the service provided.
5:13:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Margin of Error
The Netcraft Web Server Survey for July is out already. The survey notes the effect that domain parking has on the data.
Microsoft gains around 3% in the top line numbers this month, primarily through register.com putting a Windows based front end back in place on their domain parking system. register.com has alternated several times over recent months between using a Windows or Linux front end, and this causes a fluctuation of around 3% in the top line figures when it changes. As domains are either allowed to expire or put into active use, the influence of the domain parking systems on the survey numbers is abating, and the number of parked sites at Verisign and register.com has declined slowly but steadily during the course of this year.
It's illustrative to compare the graph for market share across all domains to that for just active sites. The former graph shows Microsoft trading share with Apache, while the latter graph shows fairly steady gains by both, with Apache taking the lion's share of the gains.
Microsoft's share is tied to the penetration of Windows in the server market, while Apache's isn't. Because of this tying, I don't anticipate they'll be able to get much more than a quarter of the market overall, though certain segments may find IIS more appealing. The addition of ASP.NET hooks to Apache may reduce that appeal. IIS has two advantages over Apache: It's included with Windows 2000 and XP, and it supports the latest bells and whistles from Microsoft. As they become more and more interchangeable, the advantage lies with the tool makers: which tools work best with which product?
Or, to look at this from a slightly different angle, IIS no longer adds value to Windows. Since revenue comes from other products, increasing the reach of the .NET Frameworks will increase the probability of increased revenue: We don't care what web server you use (but it will be easier with ours).
2:43:10 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration