There's no doubt that Linux owns the web but for everything else there's a crap ton of legacy business software line of business apps databases file servers and tons of other things that run on Windows server
Growth is non existent and has actually gone down every year since 2008 according to Google Trends data.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&tz=0&date=...
I can not provide you an Install count stat, i am sure someone deep inside Microsoft knows that number, but windows servers are used in non-public facing workloads. Not on the Internet.
that deviation happened years ago.
However since we are talking about vmWare which is also using mostly in non-internet facing workloads then it is relevant.
I have some 20 years of experience as a system administrator on internal IT Teams, I don't support cloud apps, I do not develop cloud apps, i dont do DevOps, the only "cloud" companies like mine use is Office 365. I work exclusive on supporting internal workloads for companies in the Manufacturing / Industrial market segments
For industries like mine windows is the dominate server platform, most of our software vendors require it, often also requiring SQL Server. Hell I have multimillion dollar pieces of equipment that come in with Windows 10 has system they are using to control them.
Out side of the Web, linux is a minor player
So I don’t really know how else to respond to this… it also relies on a secret magic number that nobody can see that shows the real truth so it’s kind of a silly argument.
If windows server usage is growing surely there must be a lot of compelling evidence to back it up?
Google search trend isn't directly linked to marketshare