It makes sense on an individual level. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft. Maybe they should be, but they won't.

plenty of people have been fired for buying Microsoft

Elon Musk was one of them (at what became Paypal)

Musk was fired for digging in and spending months insisting a working MVP written in Java on Solaris be rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows because he knew the latter and not the former, not because of any intrinsic failing of the latter.

It's a form of self-harm at this point..?

Our company signed a huge 5 year deal with microsoft for azure services just today. We evaluated all major providers for more than a year, Microsoft offered the best terms by far, and we were able to meet all of our needs using it just as well as with AWS or GCP.

Honest question, why was the decision wrong? It does not matter to me eather way, I’m just an engineer that was brought in to consult on some aspects of the contract.

Because some people prefer to bash things with open source rocks instead of using a proprietary hammer.

There’s an entire subculture of the IT world that spells it “Micro$oft” and refuses to acknowledge its very existence, or a valid option.

I once saw a post about how some Linux tool had support for “every major LDAP directory system” and did not list Active Directory! It’s like… dude… something like 99% of deployed LDAP systems is AD. The rest is a rounding error.

This is an uncharitable take which presents both a strawman and a false dichotomy. The reasons for avoiding Microsoft are many. And often philosophical in nature, whether with respect to business practices or the sanity of one's work environment.

I would call them rewards rather than reasons

You can choose to avoid Microsoft, that's perfectly fine. I do however find it amusing to see the very existence of Microsoft casually skipped over, as if they weren't one of the world's biggest corporations.

Imagine if someone listed "modern UNIX-like operating systems" and the list went something like: NetBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, OpenSolaris, and then went through dozens like that into ever more obscure things nobody has ever heard of, but skipped Linux like it didn't even exist. Just some Finnish guy's hobby project, not really worth discussing, right?

It gets to the point where it's absurd.

As a real example, someone made a printable SVG/PDF poster of "big data" and "data science" companies and technologies. They were listing dinky little startups that had a total value smaller than the annual cost of an individual Azure storage blob container that I deleted to save money. That was an "oops" by someone that the customer didn't even notice.

You're still strawmanning by lumping together a huge amount of people with different motivations under one homogeneous group.

> It gets to the point where it's absurd.

All of the examples you provide don't paint some cohesive picture, they come across as random, haphazard strokes with no form or meaning. Your original comment attempted to answer a question by ridiculing an entire demographic of people who care much more about human rights than you realize.

Okay, let me paint you a picture: I will never go as a tourist to certain countries. I don't want to support their economies with my dollars because I think they're morally bankrupt places. I also value my own safety, freedom, and the like. Think Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc...

That doesn't mean I'll just ignore their existence or forget to list them as places in the world.

It's a uniquely Linux-fanboy thing to just pretend Microsoft doesn't exist, or that it's not even worth including in a list.

"Superpowers: Russia, China, and India."

"Hello!? United States!"

"The united what?"

No, your comment is still coming across as close-minded and judgemental, and you are likely engaging in sharpshooter's fallacy as well by examining a few cherry-picked examples to support this weird crusade you seem to have against "Linux-fanboys".

Overall, this take feels immature and insensitive to the ideals that drive Linux users.

I think that subculture you're referring to existed in 1990s in places like /.,, but I never encountered it during 2010s or 2020s.

(I think it is directly related to the lack of stranglehold which MS had over much of daily computing in 1990s. Apple, Linux, and mobile platforms forced it to compete and innovate more seriously, winning back quite some respect.)

Microsoft products are often criticized for being expensive to use on public clouds other than Azure. In terms of "bundling", Microsoft has not changed its ways.

I was having a twitter argument the other day with someone who maintained that they never really come across any Microsoft systems in their work and who would be crazy enough to use Windows Server. I've worked in orgs from 100 people to 10,000 and it's always Active Directory and MS all the way through with odd few Ubuntu or RHEL servers for a internal application.

You haven't worked at a tech company then.

The only Windows systems I've seen in over 15 years were to run Active Directory over 10 year ago (and not since), my personal gaming desktop (which no longer runs Windows) and GitHub runners for cross compilation.

There's plenty of Microsoft out there, but there's an entire, thriving universe where Microsoft is completely irrelevant.

IIRC, both Intel and Qualcomm have a lot of Microsoft IT infrastructure.

One gains a lot of benefits by building with libre or permissive software. Proprietary software comes with licensing fees and sometimes complex DRM systems that need maintenance. There are totally situations where both are the better tool for the job, though generally the proprietary "solutions" are often just short-term "let's get this done now" stuff, that then later has an increased cost. Leaning on a proprietary solution also means you're downstream of any decision the makers of the tool make, including choosing to nuke your (and/or your business's) use case.

I can't comment on the LDAP thing on a technical level, but if the focus is on libre software, why is it apropos to list proprietary things that it's compatible with? Software that boasts this compatibility doesn't always keep it, or sometimes loses it due to deliberate action from the proprietary party. I don't think I'd list Active Directory either. It's not something one can vouch for unless they're literally Microsoft.

Unless your business is in the line of user authentication, what business advantage would one get by developing their own LDAP server? It would be an incredibly inefficient use of resources if you're a 100 person shop only wanting unified logins.

This question feels like it belongs to another comment: where does GP talk about “developing ones own LDAP server”?

No, it was in response to the correct comment but I should elaborate.

> Leaning on a proprietary solution also means you're downstream of any decision the makers of the tool make, including choosing to nuke your (and/or your business's) use case.

My understanding is that OP is advocating free/libre software protects a business from changes in software that could affect the business' use case.

This risk is present in both proprietary and free/libre software. Maintainers may remove features that some users find critical. If a feature is removed and your business requires the feature, you now need to maintain a fork of the software or contribute development time upstream.

You're right, by trusting any outside source for a dependency, you're still dependent. But as you noted, there's the option of adopting the software yourself and injecting it as vendored or something similar. Proprietary doesn't even have that.

Depending on the project, it may move slow enough for the dependency to be slow to update and it be fine. Depends on what you're doing.

At least in the case you mentioned, I can revert to an older version and freeze it there until my business can sort out the way forward.

Ideally, one chooses dependencies that are easy to replace and reasonable to maintain for a bit, if needed. Or if you're lucky, no dependencies at all!

It's pretty much best of the bad choice when it comes to cloud providers.

One of fun things we had with our MS experience was writing code that should work according to docs, returned nonsensical errors (not documented, generic kind of error) from their API, only for that to magically start working next day...

Even the basic stuff appears to be shoddy in places, for example I received notification about meeting that I was added to 5 days ago about 3h before the meeting.... when the meeting author edited the meeting to add next person.

Also trying to find what made e-mail land into spam in cloud exchange is near-impossibility... and whitelisting them in global rules just doesn't fucking work for no good reason. It's utter mess.

> Microsoft offered the best terms by far

How is that possible? I'm guessing you mean the best terms for Windows machines and Windows-based services. As soon as you exit the Microsoft realm, the prices plummet...

You can solve business problems within the Microsoft realm at commercially reasonable costs. That’s all that matters to the business. Easy to get support, easy to find humans to run it. Like McDonald’s, Microsoft sells consistency. Is an alternate solution cheaper? Would have to compare total cost of ownership to come to a firm conclusion.

In a corporate setting, I've experienced many problems with Microsoft and their services.

Just off the top of my head, we had a ms forms, a couple actually, that as soon as they hit 50k entries, broke in weird ways. Not accepting new entrys, dropping entries, etc..

That's just one example I immediately recall where I could code up a better solution in a short amount of time, that just shouldn't be a thing with a large cloud/service provider like Ms.

How did this process rate the relative security of the clouds? How much does security matter to your business?

A common bureaucratic failure mode when evaluating competitors is to make a bunch of categories:

Performance: 4/5 Ease of use: 4/5 Cost: 3/5 Security: 0/5

and then average them. When for these categories, you probably should compare the minimum rather than average.

Some of their systems are fune. Knowing wich ones, thats tough

C#, VSC, and those are my two examples.

I worked at a place that used Azure and was told "When Microsoft has a problem, customers understand, its like a natural disaster, can't be avoided. When AWS has a problem customers say 'Huh, what's AWS, fix it now'"

I can't remember any outages in the few years I worked there though.

Lack of vested interest. Tick the boxes, blame someone else when shit hits the fan, assuming they haven’t jumped ship before then.

We're a small B2B company. For VMs, AWS doesn't have a data center in our country (Norway) which is important due to data storage regulations, nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on... so it's Azure or some local players.

We've tried the latter, twice, they got bought and support quality tanked both times. We don't want to manage hardware yet, so...

Also, customers want MSSQL, and managed MSSQL is nice since it's trivial to scale up and down with the needs of the customer.

Started using their other services like Service Bus, Blob Storage and Application Insights. We're using .Net so integration is quite simple.

It wasn't my call, but there weren't that many great alternatives from what I can see.

> nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on..

In the case of GCP this is untrue.

> We're using .Net so integration is quite simple.

This is the reason for most deployments. They are MS shops so the go with the MS Cloud.

> In the case of GCP this is untrue.

You're probably right, but anything that isn't core to their ad business seems highly risky to rely on long-term.

I certainly wouldn't risk recommending them.

> customers want MSSQL

Why would they want that when PostgreSQL exists? That's like saying customers "want" Oracle databases despite the existence of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Integrated in-memory tables, columnstore analytics, etc…

Postgres has its strengths, but so does MSSQL.

Unfortunately you don't get to choose the database that the very expensive canned software the company bought years ago runs on.

That's more of a "I'm forced to use this thing against my will because I'm locked in" situation rather than "I want to use this thing".

This comes from the large customers who still wants on-prem.

They already run it due to other software than ours, so their IT is already familiar and has permissions, auditing etc in place.

There are plenty of companies that effectively cannot use AWS because it is owned by Amazon, and either they or one of their customers is in direct competition with Amazon. For example, if you are a vendor for Walmart, they do not want their data ever landing on AWS.

This!

We are, ostensibly for cost savings, moving to Azure Virtual Desktops for our local development environments. It’s going to be a glorious shit show.

We found a bug in azure today where our security key was too big and their auth stack failed. They will try to push a fix in two weeks. They're doing their best.

Large enterprises using MS Office suite eventually rolled into O365. Sharepoint, same. MS cloud offerings were simply evolutionary. Enterprises simply had to shift from capex to opex. This is why they stayed.

Sadly for a lot of these companies it's more of a "business" decision than a technical one. Having said that I will not work for a company in the future that has their primary infrastructure in Azure.

I can tell you why places that previous consulting contracts I've taken used it:

1. Its cheaper

2. They're already a C# shop so it just "feels right"

Thats about it, really. That appears to be the sum of the thought that went into it. And that also explains why they had to bring myself (and others) in as very expensive consultants to un-fuck various systems...