The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones.
Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it.
There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.
Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.
> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.
The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.
If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.
Everything feeds everything else. If Apple had a stack and a business model that worked for game developers, you’d see a different stack.
Microsoft is where it is because they are viciously competitive at different layers of the stack. Apple wants a piece of every nickel, Microsoft wants a piece of every computer. They license windows for every Mac user in a company.
"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way."
I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.
I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen.
"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen."
I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny.
How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of?
OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently.
I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ...
Sorry, got carried away there.
Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?
ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
Thanks for trying to expound on my expounding on the original. But, the response indicates they don't know and actively avoid learning. Thus, nothing would change their mind.
PS: to throw some shade- I'm surprised they didn't (mis)spell it M$- after all everything they mentioned is making me nostalgic for phpBB based tech forums in 2004.
To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app.
I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots.
It’s just… end-to-end bad. Everything from critical dependencies developed by one Russian kid that’s now getting shot at in Ukraine so “maintenance is paused” to everything being wired up with shell scripts that have fifty variants, no standards, and none of them work. I’ve spent more time just getting the builds and deployments to work (to an acceptable standard) for Node.js than I’ve spent developing entire .NET applications! [1]
I have had similar experiences every few years for decades. I touched PHP once and recoiled in horror. I tried to get a stable build going for some Python ML packages and learnt that they have a half-life measured in days or hours after which they become impossible to reproduce. Etc…
Keep on assuming “Microsoft is all bad” if you like. You’re tying both hands behind your back and poking the keyboard with your nose.
PS: The dotnet SDK is open source and works fine on Linux, and the IntelliJ Rider IDE is generally very good and cross-platform. You're not forced to use Windows.
[1] The effort required to get a NestJS app to have barely acceptable performance is significantly greater than the effort to rewrite it in .NET 9 which will immediately be faster and have a far bigger bag of performance tuning tools and technologies available if needed.
I have a lot of respect for organizations that get a lot done with Microsoft technologies. I think your perspective could be thought of as the benefits of vertical integration and vendor lock in. These do help people get things done!
In the academic and open source world those things are fought against because you don't want to be at the mercy of the software developer in the context of certain rights.
I think for every negative you mention on either side a positive could be found on either side. And like many things on the net, you're not wrong but not necessarily talking about the same kinds of things.
My remaining complaints about Microsoft are the inflexibility of their solutions that command abstractions that just don't work for many organizations, and the general viral nature of software sales in general of which they are one of many with similar issues, however Oracle is the worst of course.
Perfectly valid points. I've worked in academia, and their insistence on non-Microsoft technologies was helpful in certain fields where openness and long-term reproducibility is critical.
The downside is that this produces a microcosm of obscure technologies that can have... strange effects on industry. Some FAANG-like companies have a habit of hiring only recent graduates, so their entire staff is convinced that what they saw at their University is how everybody else does things.
It leads to Silicon Valley clique that has a fantastically distorted perspective of the rest of the world.
Some comments I've seen here on HN are downright hilarious to anyone from the "rest of the world", such as:
"Does anyone still use Windows Server!?" -- yes, at least 60% of all deployed servers world wide, and over 80% in many industries.
"Supports all popular directory servers such as OpenLDAP, ApacheDS, Kopano, ..."
-- hello!? Active Directory! Have you heard of it!? It's something like 95% of all deployed LDAP deployments no matter how you count it! The other 5% is Oracle Directory and/or Novell eDirectory and then all of the rest put together is a rounding error.
I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.
Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience.
The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever.
The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on.
The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost...
Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals...
Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros!
When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.
All that, and finally, PowerShell, literary light years ahead of everything Linux has to offer. I have PTSD from bash and friends. It is so good, that I rarely even write C# nowadays for most of the critical government stuff and simply run smallish scripts as services, and change them on the server when intervention is needed in notepad, in a couple of minutes, while my colleagues still worm up their full-blown Visual Studio.
I love it like it is the hottest wife that have a great job, do the dishes and cooks like a grandma (I am bad at this :))
Azure has some things about it that I don't like (compared to AWS), but it wins over AWS for Azure App Services. Essentially, IIS (webserver) as a service (PaaS), with autoscaling, auto-deployment, hot swap slots, auto-recovery, backups, etc. At it's core, it's basically a managed Docker container (either Windows or Linux) with IIS, so you can customize it quite a bit like a familiar VM, but unlike a VM, updates and security is all managed for you.
Beanstalk is a joke compared to AAS, and I'm more than happy to stay far away from Docker/K8s until that complexity is actually required, which it usually isn't until an entire department handles your K8s clusters/EKS.
Microsoft, for all their warts, has the absolute best documentation for every public API in Windows. I'd go so far as to say it's better on average than manpages in Linux and BSD and light years better than the actively hostile bullshit from Apple.
Submitting a bug report though, you gotta know people or know where to ask.
The old documentation was the best. The new stuff is a mix of barely acceptable and absolute crap, and some of it is even AI-generated. Here's a recent funny:
How do you separate the good from the bad? What do you do when Microsoft changes the good things into bad things?
My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.
I still find it hard to believe that so many people and companies are prepared to use Microsoft's online/cloud services.
Not ony is this a single point of failure but it's one they've no control over whatsoever. Same goes for Google/Youtube etc. It's as risky as flying a passenger jet with only one engine.
What are they thinking, why are they prepared to risk everything?
Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.
If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?
Ironically appropriate example. Many of the most famous restaurants in the world, like Noma [1], are famous precisely for sourcing ingredients that bypass mega-farming. At Noma many of the dishes are based on the produce provided from local foraging.
And contrary to what you might expect from its presentation/reputation, the place itself is just a building surrounded by green houses and a guy growing and harvesting most of his own stuff. It's an extreme example, but the issue is fairly typical at nice restaurants.
I'm not really sure this is true. Big companies find themselves with a big problem by the nature of their own weight. To simply exist they need to see revenue in the millions, if not billions of dollars. So everything rapidly becomes about money. That, in turn, equally rapidly leads to rent-seeking as a goal, which just generally turns everything into a dystopia from inception to production to launch.
No, I'd never use a 2-person startup, that's silly and irresponsible. I'd keep my services in-house and use multiple companies to store backups as I've done for decades—as we all used to do before the renting/leasing software (ripoff) model.
Nor would I ever use software that lives on a remote server that I've no direct control over.
Let's hope Trump does more blocking, it's the only way to wake up a lazy sleepy world.
BTW, isn't 'infinitely' somewhat of an exaggeration?
It's a simple opportunity cost calculation. The service is there, provides value. Creating a replacement is not realistic. Paying for another replacement gives you potential headaches from using a less popular service. So when choosing between not doing a thing or doing a thing with the risk of spof, it's often a reasonable choice to go with those services.
Do you consider the same single point of failure to use AWS?
There's a pretty significant lower bound of size to where you can reasonably have multiple points of failure. And like oh well if you use this stack you could theoretically move at any time isn't really the same thing as being multi-homed. I've been at places where this has been a concern of the leadership but the economics of it have never really worked out compared to spending your time working on anything else related to the business.
This applies to any company homed in the US. Not sure why Microsoft is singled out. Why Google, or Amazon, or Apple would oppose demands of the US government?
Maybe that's a good correction or follow up article to consider. These concerns aren't specific to Microsoft in any way. They apply to all tech companies that wish to operate within the United States.
GitHub is also from them and brings the very same risks. The solution would be to build viable open source alternative but decentralized. GitLab Federation [1] or Forgejo (Codeberg) Federation [2] might be the answer.
In the era of globalization businesses expected to only follow a set of harmonized global laws set through treaty. TPP etc. Now globalization is reversing and business is expected to follow the law of the nation they're from wherever they're operating.
I'd argue that the laws that must be obeyed form an odd superset of the laws of the nation from where the organization is operating and the laws where the users are located. Where those laws intersect nicely, the mode of operation is clearly defined, where they do not intersect, the mode of operation becomes very tricky. (As we've seen with privacy, cookie laws, etc.)
Some things go deep, true. However most businesses don't use most of Microsoft products - even the ones that do, the usage of the more complicated products is far more minuscule than imagined by e.g. CFOs, etc.
The real thing keeping many "in the fold" as it were would be authentication services.
Which are overcomplicated and probably easier to manage without...
Right, it’s stuff like Active Directory and how everything’s tied together. Once you’re using that for auth, it’s really tough to back out without a lot of effort.
We’ve looked into FreeIPA and similar options, but honestly, nothing really holds a candle to Active Directory yet.
AD and Domain Servers are like a cancer that will grow metastases around your org, costing user and client cals all over the place, even for every desk phone if you're not careful. The only winning move is never to play their game in the first place.
I'm in a situation where due to staff skillsets and ease of management then GPOs are required. Local GPOs would be insane to manage across thousands of PCs
InTune/MDMs are finally eating away at the need for GPOs for most use cases. Someone already familiar with AD & Group Policy should be able to easily transition to InTune Configuration Policies. MS even has a tool now to import your GPOs.
There's still a few that don't have direct equivalents, but the list is growing smaller and smaller.
It really depends on the size of the business. With smaller businesses it is easy to use alternatives. However any business beyond 1000 employees will give in to shareholder pressure and adopt distrust as its core value.
Microsoft Active Directory has excellent tooling for middle-management-heavy businesses. For better or for worse it provides the most integrated solution to reduce a desktop PC to a perfect thing for repetitive, boring, soul crushing office work. No other software solution comes close.
While I like Windows as a desktop platform, the reasons that it was designed as it is are very clear. To make cheapest laptops as dystopian as possible, you need systems that can run the same boring software for decades. Not for the good for the environment but for profits.
Windows provides all APIs to deeply integrate with Active Directory and MS Office. All engineering, accounting and finance software are deeply integrated with them. They literally run entire countries. I have seen engineering software that used Visio diagrams for designing factory pipelines. It is near impossible to pull the bigger businesses and governments out of this trap without completely upending entire sectors worth trillions. I think only very determined regimes like China can pull it off.
Massive. AD isn't just LDAP and Policies. There's somewhere around 14 services that are involved, even NetLogin still has it's tiny part to play. AD uses LDAP referrals, expects clients to follow them, and use the SRV records to find the DC in the same site (if one exists). AD as it is typically deployed is active/active multimaster with per-record tiebreaking based on edit time, client-based load balancing with proximity awareness, ACLs for every possible field and record, overridable at any point in the tree (389ds can do this, but openldap is a nightmare). There's a full automated PKI in there for managing certs for everything, and that's before we get into the KDC logic, the strange things SYSVOL can do, and various other things that integrate with AD.
Samba, krb5 &co can handle small cases, but it's architecture is still stuck in the nt4 days, and there's limited cohesive integration with LDAP and the other services.
Active Directory is not one single product. It is an ecosystem. Windows desktops, Windows servers, Microsoft Office, Azure, third party apps running on Windows using Windows APIs and Microsoft server products are all supporting it.
Here is a typical office use case in an engineering environment:
A user logs into their Windows laptop. It uses a Windows domain which is part of Active Directory system. It connects to the domain server to check the credentials. Those credentials are regularly cached into the Windows laptop. Moreover the company issues smartcards for sensitive access. The user can use the smartcard to login to the laptop too. Active Directory handles the certificates. The manufacturer's driver software integrates with Windows and the Active Directory system.
Group Policy is also stored by the domain server and depending on the user's credentials and the roles in the Active Directory system, the relevant engineering apps can be automatically installed on the user's laptop (let's say Altium or Autodesk). The engineering app then integrates with Active Directory to associate the license with the user's identity on Active Directory.
The user does their work and want to save a report from the engineering app (let's say a Bill of Materials report), it can be automatically saved to user's OneDrive account as an Excel file. The user can then take this report and share it on SharePoint which is OneDrive but more businessy and it supports creating web pages. So now the user can publish this as a web page in their department's SharePoint instance which they use as the main documentation portal. All of the other third party software like VPN logins, HR systems etc. are all also depend on Active Directory to get the credentials.
The scenario above is not just hypothetical. A majority of the biggest conglomerates and even smaller companies are completely locked in. Most of the Western governments too. The usual infrastructure roads, pipelines, power lines etc. were all designed and managed in Active Directory connected Windows PCs.
You cannot just replace Active Directory. You need to replace all the infrastructure around it. That includes not only Microsoft systems but also all the third party software that integrates with it. It is a multi-hundered billion dollar industry of proprietary apps all integrating with each other.
> Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to copy Active Directory in an open source project (like how Excel is copied by LibreOffice)?
>
> Like if orgs need this capability why is there no good open source solution?
Btw if you think LibreOffice Calc is anywhere close to being an alternative to Excel, you are very mistaken. Just in the basic set of functionality, Calc is 2 decades behind. Excel has a lot of integration with databases to automatically fetch data and update the fields accordingly. If you have a big spreadsheet, Calc struggles a lot while Excel can scale millions of rows quite easily.
Why there is no open-source solution? Because it requires a central entity to develop those elementary APIs combined with an operating system and office suite combo. The entity needs to convince all those multi-billion dollar companies to buy their product. Then it needs to send engineers to work with both clients and software vendors to handle all sorts of kinks and weird use cases.
Microsoft has been doing this since 90s. The entire corporate desktop ecosystem has developed around them and they ensured that Windows and Office would be a centerpiece of all those systems. A bazaar-style open source ecosystem will not be able to manage the scale. Without a central vision and strong product management, it is not possible to mesh multiple projects together. The current open-source systems cannot even agree on which GUI display protocol to use which is just microscopic compared to everything else.
Only a very determined government with virtually unlimited funds and very stable decision making (very likely to be authoritarian) can force all the companies to switch something else. China is that government and they are somewhat successful but not entirely.
And, you can couple all that with Microsoft 365 to enable cloud-first for everything that makes sense. Cloud Active Directory (a.k.a. Entra), Intune and Autopilot for devices that can be shipped directly from Dell and provisioned/set up through a M365 sign in by the end-user. IT never even has to be in the same zipcode as the new laptop or ever remotely connect to it to perform maintenance tasks.
Cloud AD also works seamlessly with on-prem AD, allowing things like online, self-service password reset for the domain, and in the reverse direction to use TPM-backed certificates/WebAuthn for securing web apps or anything behind MS-linked SSO. Of course, it also integrates tightly with Azure, so you can do RBAC for any VM/service in Azure, since they automatically get service identities in your AD.
That level of integration is so far above anything else on the market that it isn't even a discussion.
> IT never even has to be in the same zipcode as the new laptop or ever remotely connect to it to perform maintenance tasks.
That sounds nice, but that's not exactly a feature specific to AD.
All perfectly possible with a couple well placed scripts and some remote logins.
> TPM-backed certificates/WebAuthn for securing web apps or anything behind MS-linked SSO
Yeah this is the overengineered stuff that is therefore difficult to replicate. Certs and auth predate AD and Azure, the lock-in comes from the overcomplicated SAML style rickety tower of doom that just barely functions...
How are you having Dell ship a brand new laptop to a non-technical user and having that machine configured/software installed with a couple of scripts?
Autopilot locks Windows OOBE to your Intune instance based on the serial number. The user only has to know their email and a temp password if they're new, or existing login/otp if not. The device can be remotely wiped, and it will start back over at the OOBE (Windows install), ready for the next user.
You can't achieve that with scripts. That requires the ubiquity of Windows as an OS (so device manufacturers play ball). You may find that lock in distasteful, but if that's the world you're already in, it's a magical timesaver.
If your point is there is a heavy vendor presence, yeah, sure.
But yes, it is all scriptable. Someone has to provision the device, whether that's you or Dell, that's your choice as the customer, not some inherent superiority of one system over another.
Trump has been outrageously hostile to our supposed European allies, and is extremely petty, vindictive, and doesn’t give a damn about security or privacy. Furthermore, the checks that would normally provide counter this like congress or the Supreme Court are currently stacked such that he can do horrendous things without consequence. Our media and tech companies are also more than happy to avoid challenging him.
Other countries reliant on US based cloud giants are understandably alarmed at his behavior, and it is now a strong possibility that Trump will attempt to use their reliance on our tech companies to wring from them whatever he wants.
So the idea of escaping US tech monopolies has become very popular among those paying attention.
And the hardest part of it often ends up being "We can replace most of Microsoft's apps and services except one (and it's usually Excel) so we might as well just keep everything else."
Microsoft is king at "Good enough." It's rarely the best option of anything, but what they do put out is bundled aggressively and is generally "good enough."
So, you have a business where a large portion of the user base needs Excel. So you have licensing for that. Sure you can still use other services - you can use Okta instead of EntraID, some other MDM besides InTune, some other EDR besides Defender but once you have 1 product, why would you, when it's significantly cheaper (both in terms of actual cost per user per month and in terms of employing talent that can administer a MS ecosystem) to just go all in with Microsoft.
Because of the way Microsoft designed their suite of software and services, the only realistic choice is either all in on Microsoft, or no Microsoft at all, and to fix that we need antitrust action.
Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft.
From what I gather, the bigger challenges for businesses are more about the tech ecosystem Microsoft has built. It's hard to just swap out core services like AD without huge disruptions.
Ah, that makes sense. I missed that detail on first read
Yeah, I can see how events like that raise real concerns for foreign governments relying on US-based infrastructure. Even if Microsoft isn’t directly doing anything aggressive, the potential for state pressure is enough to make countries want more control over their tech stack
I think the current subtrends of things like a resurgence of interest in mechanical watches, fountain pens, steampunk, etc, are sort of a large excursion on a dampening social problem: that technology is too far beyond our comprehension.
Can you even even tell what network stack got you this packet?
How about the protocols that got it from the network to your screen?
How about the quantum mechanics of the phosphors that pushed out the photons?
There are certainly techno-luddites/visionaries who are running their own email servers, but it's a pretty hostile environment for personal email servers. Ignoring the spam, just getting the existing big boys to trust you can be humiliating exercise in futility.
Can I get by without Excel? Sure. Google Sheets? Sure. No spreadsheet at all? Gonna be hard.
A good business continutiy plan will accept that and any other risk with the compensating control of insurance. Yes, there is a statistic and probability of your entire business going out like a lightswitch, however if you have insurance to mitigate that risk, it isn't game over.
> There was a recent incident where Microsoft somehow allegedly blocked a mailbox of a sanctioned individual. Any organization highly depending on MS products that might come into the crosshair should ask - can this happen to me? What would be the cost? How much I invest into prevention of this scenario? In this article I try to get the facts straight and use a return on security investment calculation to try and judge this situation in a rational way. Let’s grab our tinfoil hats and find out if it’ll be fine.
I can't understand why people are still using proprietary software like Windows or OSX when superior free software exists. It's a testament to the hidden monopolizing forces which exists in our society.
Linux only just gained support for things like HDR, a decade after macOS or Windows, and the main desktop shipped by the main distributions doesn't even natively support tray icons.
I'm not sure it's superior. Although GNOMEs workspace implementation imho is vastly superior to both Windows and macOS
Then why is it that every person I know or even heard about who switched to Linux never went back to OSX or Windows?
The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives. Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.
Are you kidding? By the time you get through the first half of the requirements document of most windows customers, OSX and Linux alternatives have already been thoroughly ruled out.
OSX hasn't existed for five years and hasn't been publicly advertised as that for much longer, so your sampling may be biased.
> The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives.
No, it's the availability of daily software that people use, like Excel, Word, Outlook, etc.
> Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.
I daily drive a Linux distro. I don't pretend it's better for the average human than MacOS or Windows. The market reflects that. Clearly, you've never worked in an office where the only thing available is a Windows or Mac laptop because those are what IT provides and that's where your customers/users are.
"I was horrified to learn that there’s an Azure container behind every cell of a spreadsheet executing the python code instead of… you know, my PC doing the work."
Fundamentally it’s hard to pushback against an authoritarian government. There is very little to stop Trump from sending Doge into MS headquarters with Marines and demanding admin access so they can make the change. Thinking the dependency on Microsoft (or any company) is the risk then you haven’t been paying attention.
The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones.
Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it.
There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.
Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.
> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.
The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.
If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.
Game customers are on Windows because DirectX has been superior to OpenGL - development wise - for what, 30 years?
Everything feeds everything else. If Apple had a stack and a business model that worked for game developers, you’d see a different stack.
Microsoft is where it is because they are viciously competitive at different layers of the stack. Apple wants a piece of every nickel, Microsoft wants a piece of every computer. They license windows for every Mac user in a company.
"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way."
I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.
Bah, leaving out .NET like this is ignorance, considering the amount of custom applications every company has written on it.
RAD was a game changer and I think you don't know the extent and penetration of .NET in the enterprise
Well. this is clearly just a example of a hard problem where MS tools are good for.
The MOST common developer that work on MS stack is in business apps and web, data, integration stuff.
There is much better fit for MS and there is NO good counterpart in OSX or Linux.
One of the major shocks I get when starting to work on OSX is how much less developed EVERYTHING is outside the ms stack.
The only good reason you have a life working in OSX and less in Linux is because the web lower the playing field.
But if this were a contest of "native" vs "native" is clear MS stack is ahead.
(Much more before, because of course the web change the equation so you can claim things FOR THE WEB are better on linux and even osx)
I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen.
Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.
"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen."
I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny.
How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of?
OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently.
I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ...
Sorry, got carried away there.
Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?
ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
Typescript is used by web developers over the world and ONNX for deploying deep neural networks. Two huge markets.
A game engine is often an example of a 'complex beast'.
No one is arguing that developing game engines specifically is common.
Thanks for trying to expound on my expounding on the original. But, the response indicates they don't know and actively avoid learning. Thus, nothing would change their mind.
PS: to throw some shade- I'm surprised they didn't (mis)spell it M$- after all everything they mentioned is making me nostalgic for phpBB based tech forums in 2004.
To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app.
I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots.
It’s just… end-to-end bad. Everything from critical dependencies developed by one Russian kid that’s now getting shot at in Ukraine so “maintenance is paused” to everything being wired up with shell scripts that have fifty variants, no standards, and none of them work. I’ve spent more time just getting the builds and deployments to work (to an acceptable standard) for Node.js than I’ve spent developing entire .NET applications! [1]
I have had similar experiences every few years for decades. I touched PHP once and recoiled in horror. I tried to get a stable build going for some Python ML packages and learnt that they have a half-life measured in days or hours after which they become impossible to reproduce. Etc…
Keep on assuming “Microsoft is all bad” if you like. You’re tying both hands behind your back and poking the keyboard with your nose.
PS: The dotnet SDK is open source and works fine on Linux, and the IntelliJ Rider IDE is generally very good and cross-platform. You're not forced to use Windows.
[1] The effort required to get a NestJS app to have barely acceptable performance is significantly greater than the effort to rewrite it in .NET 9 which will immediately be faster and have a far bigger bag of performance tuning tools and technologies available if needed.
I have a lot of respect for organizations that get a lot done with Microsoft technologies. I think your perspective could be thought of as the benefits of vertical integration and vendor lock in. These do help people get things done!
In the academic and open source world those things are fought against because you don't want to be at the mercy of the software developer in the context of certain rights.
I think for every negative you mention on either side a positive could be found on either side. And like many things on the net, you're not wrong but not necessarily talking about the same kinds of things.
My remaining complaints about Microsoft are the inflexibility of their solutions that command abstractions that just don't work for many organizations, and the general viral nature of software sales in general of which they are one of many with similar issues, however Oracle is the worst of course.
Perfectly valid points. I've worked in academia, and their insistence on non-Microsoft technologies was helpful in certain fields where openness and long-term reproducibility is critical.
The downside is that this produces a microcosm of obscure technologies that can have... strange effects on industry. Some FAANG-like companies have a habit of hiring only recent graduates, so their entire staff is convinced that what they saw at their University is how everybody else does things.
It leads to Silicon Valley clique that has a fantastically distorted perspective of the rest of the world.
Some comments I've seen here on HN are downright hilarious to anyone from the "rest of the world", such as:
"Does anyone still use Windows Server!?" -- yes, at least 60% of all deployed servers world wide, and over 80% in many industries.
"Supports all popular directory servers such as OpenLDAP, ApacheDS, Kopano, ..." -- hello!? Active Directory! Have you heard of it!? It's something like 95% of all deployed LDAP deployments no matter how you count it! The other 5% is Oracle Directory and/or Novell eDirectory and then all of the rest put together is a rounding error.
I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.
Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true.
Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable.
Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk...
There are pre-built Linux and Windows ASP.NET base docker images: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deplo...
Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience.
The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever.
The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on.
Open Telemetry is fully supported and now the default: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ob...
Everything in ASP.NET uses the standard built-in ILogger interface, so wiring up any kind of audit logging or custom observability is a piece of cake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exten...
The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost...
Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals...
Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros!
When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.
All that, and finally, PowerShell, literary light years ahead of everything Linux has to offer. I have PTSD from bash and friends. It is so good, that I rarely even write C# nowadays for most of the critical government stuff and simply run smallish scripts as services, and change them on the server when intervention is needed in notepad, in a couple of minutes, while my colleagues still worm up their full-blown Visual Studio.
I love it like it is the hottest wife that have a great job, do the dishes and cooks like a grandma (I am bad at this :))
Azure has some things about it that I don't like (compared to AWS), but it wins over AWS for Azure App Services. Essentially, IIS (webserver) as a service (PaaS), with autoscaling, auto-deployment, hot swap slots, auto-recovery, backups, etc. At it's core, it's basically a managed Docker container (either Windows or Linux) with IIS, so you can customize it quite a bit like a familiar VM, but unlike a VM, updates and security is all managed for you.
Beanstalk is a joke compared to AAS, and I'm more than happy to stay far away from Docker/K8s until that complexity is actually required, which it usually isn't until an entire department handles your K8s clusters/EKS.
Microsoft, for all their warts, has the absolute best documentation for every public API in Windows. I'd go so far as to say it's better on average than manpages in Linux and BSD and light years better than the actively hostile bullshit from Apple.
Submitting a bug report though, you gotta know people or know where to ask.
It really depends how far you go. The basics - they're pretty good. But for the more complicated things they just ignore all context and pretty much restate the names of functions/arguments without explaining how/why things work. See for example https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/tsvirtua... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/tsvirtua... What does the terminal services renderer do? "It renders bitmaps you dummy, just look at those arguments!"
The old documentation was the best. The new stuff is a mix of barely acceptable and absolute crap, and some of it is even AI-generated. Here's a recent funny:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/u...
"The characteristics of the endpoint determine the size of each packet is fixed and determined by the characteristics of the endpoint."
How do you separate the good from the bad? What do you do when Microsoft changes the good things into bad things?
My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.
Hello, author here. The main point is that it's not a financially rational decision to ditch Microsoft.
There's just no real alternative for businesses, as most use AD, Teams, Outlook/Exchange and couple others.
I still find it hard to believe that so many people and companies are prepared to use Microsoft's online/cloud services.
Not ony is this a single point of failure but it's one they've no control over whatsoever. Same goes for Google/Youtube etc. It's as risky as flying a passenger jet with only one engine.
What are they thinking, why are they prepared to risk everything?
It boggles my mind.
It's cheap and it works well. Also integrates into everything related you'd need.
Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.
If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?
Ironically appropriate example. Many of the most famous restaurants in the world, like Noma [1], are famous precisely for sourcing ingredients that bypass mega-farming. At Noma many of the dishes are based on the produce provided from local foraging.
And contrary to what you might expect from its presentation/reputation, the place itself is just a building surrounded by green houses and a guy growing and harvesting most of his own stuff. It's an extreme example, but the issue is fairly typical at nice restaurants.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)
I would sure want to dine in a restaurant were vegetables were grown out of love and not as a profit making machine above all else.
Software from big companies can be made with love too?
I'm not really sure this is true. Big companies find themselves with a big problem by the nature of their own weight. To simply exist they need to see revenue in the millions, if not billions of dollars. So everything rapidly becomes about money. That, in turn, equally rapidly leads to rent-seeking as a goal, which just generally turns everything into a dystopia from inception to production to launch.
but are they? on average? how do you measure this?
it's pretty easy to talk to a solo-dev or gardener
It's easy to talk to Microsoft employees too.
No, I'd never use a 2-person startup, that's silly and irresponsible. I'd keep my services in-house and use multiple companies to store backups as I've done for decades—as we all used to do before the renting/leasing software (ripoff) model.
Nor would I ever use software that lives on a remote server that I've no direct control over.
Let's hope Trump does more blocking, it's the only way to wake up a lazy sleepy world.
BTW, isn't 'infinitely' somewhat of an exaggeration?
It's a simple opportunity cost calculation. The service is there, provides value. Creating a replacement is not realistic. Paying for another replacement gives you potential headaches from using a less popular service. So when choosing between not doing a thing or doing a thing with the risk of spof, it's often a reasonable choice to go with those services.
Do you consider the same single point of failure to use AWS?
There's a pretty significant lower bound of size to where you can reasonably have multiple points of failure. And like oh well if you use this stack you could theoretically move at any time isn't really the same thing as being multi-homed. I've been at places where this has been a concern of the leadership but the economics of it have never really worked out compared to spending your time working on anything else related to the business.
This applies to any company homed in the US. Not sure why Microsoft is singled out. Why Google, or Amazon, or Apple would oppose demands of the US government?
I suspect it was prompted by the specific story about Microsoft blocking that mailbox. So, that is probably why they were “singled out.”
Hello, author here - yes exactly. And also I don't think companies depend that completely on e.g. AWS
Maybe that's a good correction or follow up article to consider. These concerns aren't specific to Microsoft in any way. They apply to all tech companies that wish to operate within the United States.
GitHub is also from them and brings the very same risks. The solution would be to build viable open source alternative but decentralized. GitLab Federation [1] or Forgejo (Codeberg) Federation [2] might be the answer.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
In the era of globalization businesses expected to only follow a set of harmonized global laws set through treaty. TPP etc. Now globalization is reversing and business is expected to follow the law of the nation they're from wherever they're operating.
Such risks will have to be factored in now.
Businesses have never been exempt from the laws of the nation they're from.
I'd argue that the laws that must be obeyed form an odd superset of the laws of the nation from where the organization is operating and the laws where the users are located. Where those laws intersect nicely, the mode of operation is clearly defined, where they do not intersect, the mode of operation becomes very tricky. (As we've seen with privacy, cookie laws, etc.)
For most businesses, the cost and difficulty of shifting away from Microsoft outweigh the benefits
Maybe.
Some things go deep, true. However most businesses don't use most of Microsoft products - even the ones that do, the usage of the more complicated products is far more minuscule than imagined by e.g. CFOs, etc.
The real thing keeping many "in the fold" as it were would be authentication services.
Which are overcomplicated and probably easier to manage without...
Right, it’s stuff like Active Directory and how everything’s tied together. Once you’re using that for auth, it’s really tough to back out without a lot of effort.
We’ve looked into FreeIPA and similar options, but honestly, nothing really holds a candle to Active Directory yet.
AD and Domain Servers are like a cancer that will grow metastases around your org, costing user and client cals all over the place, even for every desk phone if you're not careful. The only winning move is never to play their game in the first place.
I'm in a situation where due to staff skillsets and ease of management then GPOs are required. Local GPOs would be insane to manage across thousands of PCs
InTune/MDMs are finally eating away at the need for GPOs for most use cases. Someone already familiar with AD & Group Policy should be able to easily transition to InTune Configuration Policies. MS even has a tool now to import your GPOs.
There's still a few that don't have direct equivalents, but the list is growing smaller and smaller.
genuinely interested, what are the alternatives ? i know ping/forgerock and some old ibm stuff.
what is state of the art today that compares to ActiveDirectory (not talking azureAd - or whatever they call it these days) ?
Samba4 is the closest you can get. It is not as nice as ActiveDirectory.
AD is one of the few good MS projects. But you can use it with Macs and Linux just fine!
Just keep a couple of Windows servers running AD, and migrate everything else.
Apple doesn't recommend joining Macs to AD -- their implementation is awful, along with their SMB implementation.
But it is technically possible.
It really depends on the size of the business. With smaller businesses it is easy to use alternatives. However any business beyond 1000 employees will give in to shareholder pressure and adopt distrust as its core value.
Microsoft Active Directory has excellent tooling for middle-management-heavy businesses. For better or for worse it provides the most integrated solution to reduce a desktop PC to a perfect thing for repetitive, boring, soul crushing office work. No other software solution comes close.
While I like Windows as a desktop platform, the reasons that it was designed as it is are very clear. To make cheapest laptops as dystopian as possible, you need systems that can run the same boring software for decades. Not for the good for the environment but for profits.
Windows provides all APIs to deeply integrate with Active Directory and MS Office. All engineering, accounting and finance software are deeply integrated with them. They literally run entire countries. I have seen engineering software that used Visio diagrams for designing factory pipelines. It is near impossible to pull the bigger businesses and governments out of this trap without completely upending entire sectors worth trillions. I think only very determined regimes like China can pull it off.
Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to copy Active Directory in an open source project (like how Excel is copied by LibreOffice)?
Like if orgs need this capability why is there no good open source solution?
Massive. AD isn't just LDAP and Policies. There's somewhere around 14 services that are involved, even NetLogin still has it's tiny part to play. AD uses LDAP referrals, expects clients to follow them, and use the SRV records to find the DC in the same site (if one exists). AD as it is typically deployed is active/active multimaster with per-record tiebreaking based on edit time, client-based load balancing with proximity awareness, ACLs for every possible field and record, overridable at any point in the tree (389ds can do this, but openldap is a nightmare). There's a full automated PKI in there for managing certs for everything, and that's before we get into the KDC logic, the strange things SYSVOL can do, and various other things that integrate with AD.
Samba, krb5 &co can handle small cases, but it's architecture is still stuck in the nt4 days, and there's limited cohesive integration with LDAP and the other services.
It’s been done for years. You can also always pirate windows if there’s a trade embargo.
The problem is that the modern approach is to run Entra directory in the cloud.
Active Directory is not one single product. It is an ecosystem. Windows desktops, Windows servers, Microsoft Office, Azure, third party apps running on Windows using Windows APIs and Microsoft server products are all supporting it.
Here is a typical office use case in an engineering environment:
A user logs into their Windows laptop. It uses a Windows domain which is part of Active Directory system. It connects to the domain server to check the credentials. Those credentials are regularly cached into the Windows laptop. Moreover the company issues smartcards for sensitive access. The user can use the smartcard to login to the laptop too. Active Directory handles the certificates. The manufacturer's driver software integrates with Windows and the Active Directory system.
Group Policy is also stored by the domain server and depending on the user's credentials and the roles in the Active Directory system, the relevant engineering apps can be automatically installed on the user's laptop (let's say Altium or Autodesk). The engineering app then integrates with Active Directory to associate the license with the user's identity on Active Directory.
The user does their work and want to save a report from the engineering app (let's say a Bill of Materials report), it can be automatically saved to user's OneDrive account as an Excel file. The user can then take this report and share it on SharePoint which is OneDrive but more businessy and it supports creating web pages. So now the user can publish this as a web page in their department's SharePoint instance which they use as the main documentation portal. All of the other third party software like VPN logins, HR systems etc. are all also depend on Active Directory to get the credentials.
The scenario above is not just hypothetical. A majority of the biggest conglomerates and even smaller companies are completely locked in. Most of the Western governments too. The usual infrastructure roads, pipelines, power lines etc. were all designed and managed in Active Directory connected Windows PCs.
You cannot just replace Active Directory. You need to replace all the infrastructure around it. That includes not only Microsoft systems but also all the third party software that integrates with it. It is a multi-hundered billion dollar industry of proprietary apps all integrating with each other.
> Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to copy Active Directory in an open source project (like how Excel is copied by LibreOffice)? > > Like if orgs need this capability why is there no good open source solution?
Btw if you think LibreOffice Calc is anywhere close to being an alternative to Excel, you are very mistaken. Just in the basic set of functionality, Calc is 2 decades behind. Excel has a lot of integration with databases to automatically fetch data and update the fields accordingly. If you have a big spreadsheet, Calc struggles a lot while Excel can scale millions of rows quite easily.
Why there is no open-source solution? Because it requires a central entity to develop those elementary APIs combined with an operating system and office suite combo. The entity needs to convince all those multi-billion dollar companies to buy their product. Then it needs to send engineers to work with both clients and software vendors to handle all sorts of kinks and weird use cases.
Microsoft has been doing this since 90s. The entire corporate desktop ecosystem has developed around them and they ensured that Windows and Office would be a centerpiece of all those systems. A bazaar-style open source ecosystem will not be able to manage the scale. Without a central vision and strong product management, it is not possible to mesh multiple projects together. The current open-source systems cannot even agree on which GUI display protocol to use which is just microscopic compared to everything else.
Only a very determined government with virtually unlimited funds and very stable decision making (very likely to be authoritarian) can force all the companies to switch something else. China is that government and they are somewhat successful but not entirely.
And, you can couple all that with Microsoft 365 to enable cloud-first for everything that makes sense. Cloud Active Directory (a.k.a. Entra), Intune and Autopilot for devices that can be shipped directly from Dell and provisioned/set up through a M365 sign in by the end-user. IT never even has to be in the same zipcode as the new laptop or ever remotely connect to it to perform maintenance tasks.
Cloud AD also works seamlessly with on-prem AD, allowing things like online, self-service password reset for the domain, and in the reverse direction to use TPM-backed certificates/WebAuthn for securing web apps or anything behind MS-linked SSO. Of course, it also integrates tightly with Azure, so you can do RBAC for any VM/service in Azure, since they automatically get service identities in your AD.
That level of integration is so far above anything else on the market that it isn't even a discussion.
> IT never even has to be in the same zipcode as the new laptop or ever remotely connect to it to perform maintenance tasks.
That sounds nice, but that's not exactly a feature specific to AD.
All perfectly possible with a couple well placed scripts and some remote logins.
> TPM-backed certificates/WebAuthn for securing web apps or anything behind MS-linked SSO
Yeah this is the overengineered stuff that is therefore difficult to replicate. Certs and auth predate AD and Azure, the lock-in comes from the overcomplicated SAML style rickety tower of doom that just barely functions...
How are you having Dell ship a brand new laptop to a non-technical user and having that machine configured/software installed with a couple of scripts?
Autopilot locks Windows OOBE to your Intune instance based on the serial number. The user only has to know their email and a temp password if they're new, or existing login/otp if not. The device can be remotely wiped, and it will start back over at the OOBE (Windows install), ready for the next user.
You can't achieve that with scripts. That requires the ubiquity of Windows as an OS (so device manufacturers play ball). You may find that lock in distasteful, but if that's the world you're already in, it's a magical timesaver.
> How are you having Dell ship a brand new laptop
Have the vendor ship your image?
Or provide your own bootstrap.
Probably something with netboots as well...
If your point is there is a heavy vendor presence, yeah, sure.
But yes, it is all scriptable. Someone has to provision the device, whether that's you or Dell, that's your choice as the customer, not some inherent superiority of one system over another.
And Microsoft is not unique in following court orders. You have to switch to businesses without an American presence to get around sanctions.
It is a good thing Trump is helping to change that.
I wasn't aware of any major Trump-era policies that significantly reduced Microsoft’s dominance. Curious what you're referencing?
Trump has been outrageously hostile to our supposed European allies, and is extremely petty, vindictive, and doesn’t give a damn about security or privacy. Furthermore, the checks that would normally provide counter this like congress or the Supreme Court are currently stacked such that he can do horrendous things without consequence. Our media and tech companies are also more than happy to avoid challenging him.
Other countries reliant on US based cloud giants are understandably alarmed at his behavior, and it is now a strong possibility that Trump will attempt to use their reliance on our tech companies to wring from them whatever he wants.
So the idea of escaping US tech monopolies has become very popular among those paying attention.
Thanks for the context!
Still seems like, for most businesses, the biggest hurdle is how deeply Microsoft’s services are embedded rather than politics
And the hardest part of it often ends up being "We can replace most of Microsoft's apps and services except one (and it's usually Excel) so we might as well just keep everything else."
Microsoft is king at "Good enough." It's rarely the best option of anything, but what they do put out is bundled aggressively and is generally "good enough."
So, you have a business where a large portion of the user base needs Excel. So you have licensing for that. Sure you can still use other services - you can use Okta instead of EntraID, some other MDM besides InTune, some other EDR besides Defender but once you have 1 product, why would you, when it's significantly cheaper (both in terms of actual cost per user per month and in terms of employing talent that can administer a MS ecosystem) to just go all in with Microsoft.
Because of the way Microsoft designed their suite of software and services, the only realistic choice is either all in on Microsoft, or no Microsoft at all, and to fix that we need antitrust action.
I also haven't read the article but apparently reading the comments the article has to do with Trump-era policies affecting Microsoft
Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft.
From what I gather, the bigger challenges for businesses are more about the tech ecosystem Microsoft has built. It's hard to just swap out core services like AD without huge disruptions.
> Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft.
The first paragraph links to an article about how the International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email.
This has caused some governments to worry. What if MS was ordered to block access to their software because the US wanted to apply pressure?
Ah, that makes sense. I missed that detail on first read
Yeah, I can see how events like that raise real concerns for foreign governments relying on US-based infrastructure. Even if Microsoft isn’t directly doing anything aggressive, the potential for state pressure is enough to make countries want more control over their tech stack
I think the current subtrends of things like a resurgence of interest in mechanical watches, fountain pens, steampunk, etc, are sort of a large excursion on a dampening social problem: that technology is too far beyond our comprehension.
Can you even even tell what network stack got you this packet?
How about the protocols that got it from the network to your screen?
How about the quantum mechanics of the phosphors that pushed out the photons?
There are certainly techno-luddites/visionaries who are running their own email servers, but it's a pretty hostile environment for personal email servers. Ignoring the spam, just getting the existing big boys to trust you can be humiliating exercise in futility.
Can I get by without Excel? Sure. Google Sheets? Sure. No spreadsheet at all? Gonna be hard.
A good business continutiy plan will accept that and any other risk with the compensating control of insurance. Yes, there is a statistic and probability of your entire business going out like a lightswitch, however if you have insurance to mitigate that risk, it isn't game over.
> There was a recent incident where Microsoft somehow allegedly blocked a mailbox of a sanctioned individual. Any organization highly depending on MS products that might come into the crosshair should ask - can this happen to me? What would be the cost? How much I invest into prevention of this scenario? In this article I try to get the facts straight and use a return on security investment calculation to try and judge this situation in a rational way. Let’s grab our tinfoil hats and find out if it’ll be fine.
for people who didn't RTA
I can't understand why people are still using proprietary software like Windows or OSX when superior free software exists. It's a testament to the hidden monopolizing forces which exists in our society.
Linux only just gained support for things like HDR, a decade after macOS or Windows, and the main desktop shipped by the main distributions doesn't even natively support tray icons.
I'm not sure it's superior. Although GNOMEs workspace implementation imho is vastly superior to both Windows and macOS
Superior for who?
What you value is not what everyone values.
Also, I'd argue that the monopolizing forces are not so much hidden as targeted.
Because the free software isn't superior
Then why is it that every person I know or even heard about who switched to Linux never went back to OSX or Windows?
The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives. Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.
Are you kidding? By the time you get through the first half of the requirements document of most windows customers, OSX and Linux alternatives have already been thoroughly ruled out.
When it starts with the phrase “FIP-S compliant”, hardly anyone is wants to do that on Linux.
OSX hasn't existed for five years and hasn't been publicly advertised as that for much longer, so your sampling may be biased.
> The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives.
No, it's the availability of daily software that people use, like Excel, Word, Outlook, etc.
> Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.
I daily drive a Linux distro. I don't pretend it's better for the average human than MacOS or Windows. The market reflects that. Clearly, you've never worked in an office where the only thing available is a Windows or Mac laptop because those are what IT provides and that's where your customers/users are.
I honestly cannot tell if this is brilliant sarcasm or digital veganism. I hope the former, because it's perfect lol
"I was horrified to learn that there’s an Azure container behind every cell of a spreadsheet executing the python code instead of… you know, my PC doing the work."
Fundamentally it’s hard to pushback against an authoritarian government. There is very little to stop Trump from sending Doge into MS headquarters with Marines and demanding admin access so they can make the change. Thinking the dependency on Microsoft (or any company) is the risk then you haven’t been paying attention.
The incident in question targeted someone outside of the US, where DOGE has no direct influence (yet).
DOGE’s influence is wherever the administration wants it to be.
That’s the point of federation. If there’s no centralized target then the Marines have a much harder job.