I pretty much agree with much of what you wrote. But feel compelled to point out a couple of things.
Unix was initially widely used on DEC computers - PDP 16 bit and then VAX for 32 bit versions. DEC management were less than impressed so they scrambled to improve on Unix and released VMS. The key designer of VMS was lured by Microsoft and thus NT came about. Once you strip away the GUI, a lot of Windows server is quite a bit like Unix.
In the world of heavy duty servers, Unix and its many derivatives were there first - by a long shot. The key players were Sun - Solaris / SunOS, IBM with AIX and HP with HP/UX. More recently IBM have been building super-clusters using Plan9 which is a descendent from Unix and created by same guys. The increasing performance of x86 multi-core CPUs and the freedoms of GNU/Linux effectively negated the early advantages of the proprietary Unix based systems and that is the core reason for their decline, not any competitiveness from Windows server.
Windows Server won a lot of support because it was easier to click around on a GUI than to remember commands. Of course, the real Windows gurus use command line stuff and scripts. But they are the minority when it comes to Windows sysadmins.
The vast majority of big systems, think Google, Amazon, et al. use Linux systems.
Now for a fun fact. Back in the 1980s, when Microsoft only had MSDOS, they actually licensed Unix from AT&T and sold it as Xenix. Once Windows gained a foothold, they sold Xenix to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) who marketed it quite vigorously through the later 1980s and 1990s. A lot of office servers ran Xenix on IBM PC/AT hardware - some tricked out with larger disks and extra memory cards.
You have to wonder how things would have panned out had Microsoft kept Xenix and wrapped their Windows GUI around it. That same strategy worked out pretty well for Apple with OS-X which is Mach/BSD at the core with a very nice GUI on top.
Comments
I pretty much agree with much of what you wrote. But feel compelled to point out a couple of things.
Unix was initially widely used on DEC computers - PDP 16 bit and then VAX for 32 bit versions. DEC management were less than impressed so they scrambled to improve on Unix and released VMS. The key designer of VMS was lured by Microsoft and thus NT came about. Once you strip away the GUI, a lot of Windows server is quite a bit like Unix.
In the world of heavy duty servers, Unix and its many derivatives were there first - by a long shot. The key players were Sun - Solaris / SunOS, IBM with AIX and HP with HP/UX. More recently IBM have been building super-clusters using Plan9 which is a descendent from Unix and created by same guys. The increasing performance of x86 multi-core CPUs and the freedoms of GNU/Linux effectively negated the early advantages of the proprietary Unix based systems and that is the core reason for their decline, not any competitiveness from Windows server.
Windows Server won a lot of support because it was easier to click around on a GUI than to remember commands. Of course, the real Windows gurus use command line stuff and scripts. But they are the minority when it comes to Windows sysadmins.
The vast majority of big systems, think Google, Amazon, et al. use Linux systems.
Now for a fun fact. Back in the 1980s, when Microsoft only had MSDOS, they actually licensed Unix from AT&T and sold it as Xenix. Once Windows gained a foothold, they sold Xenix to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) who marketed it quite vigorously through the later 1980s and 1990s. A lot of office servers ran Xenix on IBM PC/AT hardware - some tricked out with larger disks and extra memory cards.
You have to wonder how things would have panned out had Microsoft kept Xenix and wrapped their Windows GUI around it. That same strategy worked out pretty well for Apple with OS-X which is Mach/BSD at the core with a very nice GUI on top.