According to an August 2007 survey by Netcraft, Microsoft is eating into Apache's web server market share as its Internet Information Services continues to make gains against the popular open source web server. Though Apache's lead, with 48.42 percent market share, remains substantial, at the current growth rate Microsoft might eventually take Apache's leadership position in 2008, said Netcraft.
"Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%."
In comparison, a similar survey carried out in November 2005, found Apache on 71 percent of web sites while Microsoft struggled to make 20 percent. However, the study notes that not all of Apache's loss is going Microsoft's way. Even though Microsoft is making the most significant strides, another open source server called lighttpd now holds 1.17 percent of the market while Google web server, which uses Apache code, has a share of 4.45 percent.
Considering Windows Server 2008 is set to launch in February 2008, with IIS7's increased support for dynamic programming languages, Microsoft could see further market share gains ahead.