Microsoft.com circa 1990
March 9, 2006 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
When I stop laughing I’ll post about Microsoft’s first website. It’s not overly helpful now, but they have come along way, no? At least things at Microsoft are still consistent. They are still using the tagline, "Where do you want to go today?" and they are still using a crappy server – in this case Windows NT 3.5!
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What’s wrong with IIS 6.0?
Let’s start here. ;)
As opposed to Apache, I assume?
Well if you really want to get into a web server war, I can certainly entertain you: ;)
The reality is is that Apache is used on 70% of the world’s webservers and that is for a reason. IIS 6 is more secure than IIS 5 but as long as it is integrated into the Windows runtime it will never be secure.
Microsoft has security issues because it has tunnel vision – we have a great product. Apche has nowhere near the issues because open source brings converging and often opposing viewpoints to the table where stuff is vetted out instead of rubber stamped.
Web server war. :p And no I’m not interested, really. I just like pointing out that IIS is largely secure in recent years, particularly with the advent of IIS 6.
Link 1 is from March 2004.
Link 3 is from June 2002.
Link 4 is from August 2004.
If you want to play semantics, you should say that Apache is used to host 70% of websites, not that it hosts 70% of the world’s webservers.
And I completely disagree with you on the relative security of IIS 6 vs Apache (1 and 2).
Then I’m fairly closed/open source agnostic. I run Linux and Apache 2.0 on my dedicated server for a number of reasons. Mostly cost.
Incidentally… I’d be interested to see other companies’ websites from the same era. I bet they’re equally bad, so it’d be unfair to Microsoft to make fun of them exclusively. ;)
Semantics… you’re right. I pretty much don’t subscribe to most of Microsoft’s philosophies so you won’t sway me. I just think open source approach is a better model for software development. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Sway you? Hrm. I’m not looking to sway you or anyone towards or against anything, so I’m a little puzzled by that comment.
I do take issue with you making demonstrably incorrect statements like IIS is a bad web server platform because it’s insecure, which you implied in your opening post and confirmed by your previous comments.
Personally I prefer *nix + Apache (+ PHP & MySQL or PostgreSQL) for serving, but I won’t say that IIS is a bad platform because it’s insecure because that is most certainly not correct.
Don’t be an f’n zealot. Zealoty sucks no matter what flavor it comes in. Instead try to be a conscientious objector knowledgable about the other side’s POV/product/philosophy/whatever. ;)
I actualy am a conscientious observer. I work in the second largest defense company in the world and it is all Windows. Do you know how many issues we have with Windows 2003 servers in general? Not necessarily IIS… just Win 2000/2003 server in general. Different sysadmins for different servers so you can’t chalk it up to an incompetent sysadmin.
On the contrary, I also personally maintain 2 Solaris boxess which have not been rebooted once since bringing them online, they consistently pass SIAC security scans and withe the exception of an occasional service going fubar, they just run and run well. Can’t say that about the Windows boxes that dominate the environment.
If anything a conscientious objector I am.