After Apache’s market share was shrinking month after month for more than a year it grew again a bit according to Netcraft. There are no reasons given but it is simply good to see that the fall of Apache was at least stopped for this month.
The reasons for Apache’s spectacular losses are not totally clear but there have been many insightful thoughts and assumptions. One of the main reasons according to Netcraft is that the number of web pages is currently growing mainly due to new blogs and social services. And two large, fast growing hosts, MySpace and Live Spaces, use IIS.
Anyway, in the November statistic Apache grew by 3% (1.29% active sites) while IIS lost 1.29% (1.05%). There is no explanation given by Netcraft and there has been no big news about any change of some big host or something similar (these percent points equal millions of sites!). So this might be just a statistical disturbance – or indeed a change of direction. Time will tell.
Speaking about Apache, the Apache Conference 2007 (Apache as in Apache project, not just the http server) took place during November. There are talk slides available, unfortunately the pdfs are provided without any further comment and are not linked form the talk pages themselves. This makes it very hard to get the pdf you want – if at all. I would liked to see the slides of the main talk, for example, to get a grip what the major tasks of the Apache currently are, what the current Roadmap is and what users can expect. But maybe it will only take some more time until a more structured and more complete list of talks will appear there.
/home/liquidat 
IIS was mostly gaining because of the number of parking spam websites that use it anyway. Counting those sites is like saying HotMail is more popular than GMail because more spam originates from it.
It might be a bit of a folly to simply write the downward spiral as simply spammers and companies being paid off by Microsoft. If that attitude developers with the core developers then they might become complacent (which has possibly already happened) and the project stagnates and turns into the next XFree86.