I'm almost linux-only, but I have to agree on that. Microsoft offerings look to me much more difficult to replace than Amazon's.

Do LinkedIn and Skype also disappear? Nokia? Mojang?

...I don't live in the MS stack, so I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable. Shake up to businesses that rely on Windows? Sure, but honestly I don't have troubles imagining another vendor (Apple or a *nix vendor or one of the OSes that are known and beloved to only a few) stepping in - after all, there's nothing special Windows offers. Frankly, I think this would be good - businesses have long lagged behind in be able to change because they are hampered by locked-in software limitations. My current office uses Google Docs and Gmail, and I was amazed by how little that causes problems. If MS were to vanish, I foresee a period of panic and pain...but more panic than pain, and of limited duration. In particular, assuming Windows didn't vanish, everyone would have time to deal with it. Lack up feature updates, lack of keeping up with standards, lack of security updates...MS has shown in the past that these can be survived, and while recent MS behavior has been better, I don't see "unimaginable consequences". Heck, there are still people running IE6! (very few, relatively, but 0.25% market share is still a lot of people!)

Then again, I've often noticed that being in or out of the MS stack is a bubble, and the other side sees things very differently, so I could definitely be wrong here.

The only reason Amazon vanishing would be significant is because there's not really a competitor in the whole of their space. online booksellers aren't doing online non-book goods delivery aren't doing cloud services aren't doing grocery delivery, etc. Each of those services would be easily replaced, but not by a single company.

>I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable.

Government! Government and enterprise! Neither would function without MS!!

Windows/Active Directory, Windows Server, MS SQL server, SharePoint, and Office all make the world go round in the public and private sectors. You'd have to entirely replace pretty much all corporate infrastructure.

Sure! But not all at once (we're imagining the company goes away, not that existing software disappears, per above comments), and you didn't dispute that the products are replaceable, you just stated that they are in a LOT of use.

Coke and Pepsi together represent a huge share of the soft drinks people drink. If those two flavors, or even the two companies, disappeared, it would have a notable impact in that a lot of people would find new drinks (plus the significant impact to the supply chains, distributors, etc).

But there are absolutely competitors to fill in the gaps. There ARE other soft drinks. And if none of the existing brands are up to the challenge, in the absence of a huge established market presence, we can easily imagine new companies stepping up.

Just because MS products have a huge presence in the market doesn't mean MS products are irreplaceable.

If you're imagining the company going bankrupt but their technology still existing then Amazon wouldn't be an issue either. Someone would literally just take over their logistics supply chain and move right along. It's happened in the past, it can happen again.

I would dispute that active directory is irreplaceable. There is literally nothing on the market today that has the functionality and ease of use, and getting anything on the market today to that point would be about as easy as re-writing AD from scratch.

As I mentioned up-thread, the only thing "special" about Amazon is that there isn't a single competitor in ALL their spaces. Each space definitely has competitors that would step up.

My experiences with AD are anything other than "ease of use", but again, I tend to live outside the MS stack, and it's been 15 or so years since I did anything remotely related (I did a lot of interaction with some LDAP servers, but only interact with AD as an end-user...where I have weird issues like "must authenticate with a userId@domain that is not my actual email address at that domain" or "Have to look up everyone by last name, even though we have 50 Agrawals but only one Preetha" or "can't get a frigging email address without navigating into contact details, and that won't even work if it's a forward email from someone outside" (though that might be Outlook). Voicing these complaints gets me "oh, you just don't have a good administrator", but...just about every place I've been has had these issues, so either AD isn't that easy to use or everything else is REALLY bad.

I'm also uncertain what functionality AD has that isn't specific to integrating with the MS Stack, but that's a literal lack of knowledge, not a criticism.

Amazon doesn't have any competitors? They are literally Walmart or Target + leasing access to their IT infrastructure. Name one thing that isn't AWS that doesn't overlap with Target/Walmart. And AWS literally maps to Walmart IT and Target IT, they just aren't interested in competing in that space (and rightly so).

As for AD: An email address isn't an identity. I'm not sure why you would expect the two to match. I don't login to my mac with [email protected], I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with [email protected] either.

The searching I can only surmise you were doing it wrong? I've never had an issue searching by first or last name in any tool whether it be the AD tools themselves or Outlook.

AD is a directory server, it can service a Windows environment or a Mac environment or a Linux environment. They've got a complete implementation of LDAP if you choose not to use AD auth on the client side. That being said: EVERYONE integrates with AD. Very few people integrate with anything else. I like having unified auth in my environment, perhaps you enjoy managing local hosts but that sounds disgusting to me.

If MS disappeared you would have billions of computers running an unsupported OS, running software that won't run elsewhere.

That all has to be replaced. That's billions upon billions in lost productivity.

> That all has to be replaced.

Yup...over time, just like it is ALREADY replaced over time. But let's assume I accept everything you stated without quibble.

I feel like we've lost the point of this thread. Yes, ANY large company vanishing would have a large impact. The more widespread the current influence of that company, the larger the impact.

But we weren't discussing "does MS qualify as a company with widespread influence". We weren't saying "I bet I can name a large company that could vanish without notable impact". Someone made the assertion that Amazon is somewhat unique in the results of theoretical vanishing. Even if Amazon ISN'T unique in this regard, the consequences of Amazon vanishing and MS vanishing are very, very different.

Um migrating from coke to Dr pepper doesn't cost anything.

Windows/Active Directory -- FreeIPA, Samba

Windows Server -- RHEL

MS SQL server -- PostgreSQL

SharePoint -- let it die, useless

Office -- LibreOffice, Google Apps

Um I never claimed there was no alternatives, I said that they were completely and totally ubiquitous in government and enterprise.

If MS stopped supporting their products it would be literally billions of collective dollars to migrate to alternatives.

I've been doing this a long time and in my personal observations I've noticed my corporate and (especially) government customers have been moving more into the Microsoft ecosystem than 10 years ago. MS is more important than they've ever been, if you can believe it.

It's not like everyone's deployments will just stop working if MS goes bellyup.

True, but given that they're moving towards 'Windows as a Service' it's not hard to imagine that happening someday.

Except for the Server OS. That's already built to be pretty standalone (aside from updates and collaborating with other Windows Servers). The idea here is that future security vulnerabilities aren't being patched which means it'd be open season for hackers once new vulns are discovered.

You should count yourself as lucky for not having to work in either public sector, higher ed or just plain old companies. ActiveDirectory + Windows servers disappearing overnight would pretty much send us back to the 1980s with how prevalent it is.

But the implication of the above comment was not that the programs would disappear, just the company. (I mean, any online authorizations would die, but I didn't think that was part of daily routines, just installations. Though I really know nothing of MS business-type servers (SQLServer etc))

...and I'm desperately trying to hold in comments about the small difference in performance between 1980s and MS software - I honestly blame Outlook for how the world killed email as an effective medium.

Though I do count myself lucky to have my current job. I've worked public sector in the past, and recently started up a 2nd (part time) job at a university that involves using Outlook. It is quite painful.

count yourself lucky, you could be using lotus notes

Highly prevalent != irreplaceable (though it might be a prerequisite). The fact that so many businesses/sectors use MS technology is what makes them one of the "Big 4." However, there is nothing irreplaceable about those technologies. Another vendor/technology could replace them if those businesses were forced to change due to MS disappearing.

There are many companies built on a .NET stack. They will all have a terrible time if Microsoft vanishes. Most will probably vanish with Microsoft.

With any sense, those companies would band together and invest in expanding .NET core into doing what they need.

These companies have no interest in getting into that business. That's why they pay microsoft large sums of money to do it for them.

Yeah, but we're talking about a doomsday scenario when Microsoft disappears overnight. They'd rather invest in a new .NET than have to rewrite their entire stack.

Depends on if Xamarin emerges from the ashes or if they disappear along with the rest of Microsoft.