What is the mother of all inventions?
What is the mother of all inventions? Is it the electric light bulb which was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879? Could it have been be telephone? Despite the ongoing dispute over its inventor, I believe that Alexander Bill should continue to take credit for his invention. Most regard the wheel as one of man’s most important inventions. And of course, we have to make mention of the caveman's greatest achievement – fire.
You know what? I give all these items credit for being an important to our world. However, this is a blog about Web 2.0, so I need to stick to at least the last 15 or so years. I have to agree with of columnist Charles Babcock in his article called “The Greatest Web Software Ever Written” which was featured in a May 7, 2007 addition of InformationWeek. His number one pick was Apache.
With over 125 million web sites online today, Apache is servicing 52% with Microsoft in second place 32%. Apache peaked at 70% of the Internet market share in November of 2005. However, the popularity of Microsoft's .Net framework and the growing buzz of Ajax, IIS has recaptured 12% of the market share within two years. In a recent interview with Apache Web Server Project’s co-founded, Brian Behlendorf credits the victory to the number of mom-and-pop shops as well as ISPs for the ongoing support of Apache. He also believes that part of Apache success has been due to the low-cost advantages of open-source. So from Brian's comments I question if Apache will always be the market share leader. Let's face it - as long as there are low-cost hosting services with pricing averaging well below the five dollars a month mark, Apache will continue to win.
Final thoughts on Apache are really pretty simple. The idea that a group of guys can developed such a simple program that interfaces so well with back-end systems while serving up millions of pages from multiple web sites is absolutely incredible to me. Furthermore, the software has integrated so well with open source project like perl, PHP and databases like MySQL. It is this combination that is made LAMP so successful.