[JeffAtlanta]

To be fair, isn't measuring rate of growth sort of misleading when it comes comparing large bases to smaller bases?

In other words, a county with 1,000 people would grow by 10% if only 100 additional people moved in, while a county with 100,000 would only grow by .1% is an addtional 100 people migrated to the area.

I'm not saying that the disparity of the install bases of Windows and Linux is as great as my example but I would assume that Windows is much larger.

[N3WBI3]

Except that Linux is not that much smaller a server base than windows. While its true Windows has a lager base on the server its not by more than 2 times. Linux is anywhere between 15 and 25% of the market, I think windows floats around 40%. Most market share is decided by revenue which of course will mess up the numbers because for every purchased copy of Linux running on a server there are tens dozens of free ones out there.

Whats significant here is the 5th straight year of double digit revenue growth for Linux and a continuing healthy growth in deployments

[zeugma]

To be fair, isn't measuring rate of growth sort of misleading when it comes comparing large bases to smaller bases?

Absolutely. Measurements like that are meaningless in light of the ubiquity of MS-Windows. 

The point of the article is valid though, in that you're seeing a lot more companies that were leery of Linux becoming adopters, starting with back-end processing. At my company, they are investing heavily in Linux, and interestingly enough, it's largely on the MS side of the house. They are using VMWare and running multiple instances of Windows on them for those services that are currently residing on single-tasked boxes. Linux runs directly on the hardware, then MS-Windows runs above it. It makes management of MS-Windows much easier.

We'll be doing essentially the same thing on the Unix side of the house when we start a big datacenter move in a couple of months.

[Richard Kimball]

You're not far off. MS couldn't grow by 12% without being on every computer that exists, and some that don't.