http://opensourceparking.com/

[John Van Ostrand]

On Sun, 2006-05-07 at 15:21 -0700, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 5/7/06, PW Armstrong <pwa.linux-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > have I been asleep at the switch?  (I know that's a dangerous question
> > ask, no need to answer)
> >
> > "Recently, the domain name registrar GoDaddy, used by many domain
> > resellers, switched its domain parking host from Apache to a Microsoft
> > server. GoDaddy has 4.5 Million parked domains, and this resulted in a
> > 5% market-share shift from Apache to Microsoft IIS in the Netcraft
> > report. Parked sites don't have content, so this is only an "appearance"
> > change. It's said that Microsoft offers the largest domain registrars a
> > lot of money to do this. And of course figures influence managers,
> > whether they are real or not."
> > http://technocrat.net/d/2006/4/10/2276
> >
> > can anyone shed any more light on what's happening here?
> 
> If Microsoft threw a few million$ in GoDaddy'$ direction for this, it
> wouldn't be an outrageous cost for either for this.
> 
> It's a not overly expensive way for Microsoft to put a thumb on the
> scale for some Internet statistics.
> 
> Is it fundamentally important?  These are parked domains; they are
> hardly of great importance on the Internet, so the answer is "probably
> not."
> 
> It is a cheap way to buy a bit of (perhaps vacuous) prestige...

I think it is vacuous. IIS lags behind Apache by a full 48% in actual
real sites and 37% in total domains, parked or otherwise. I think it's
easy for them to pay a few percentages at this stage to make the change,
but every percentage will cost more and more.

In my view, MS has changed their marketing. I think they have saturated
print media and are looking to combat Open Source in any way that they
can. How does one stop a grass roots competitor? Perhaps this is
unprecedented in marketing. That would explain the sponsorship of MS
only user groups, the free events that MS is sponsoring and the
Microsoft Across America truck
(http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/acrossamerica/).

They spend an absurd amount of money on marketing and are probably down
to using unorthodox methods.
-- 
John Van Ostrand
         Net Direct Inc.
 
Chief Technology Officer
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