News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Second Quarter. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by rbanffy on Thursday January 23, 2014 @05:41PM (#7111909)
> what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants?

Continuity.

If you have a full Windows shop, with hundreds or thousands of users on Active Directory, with e-mail and calendars on Exchange, all their important documents made in Office and stored on SharePoint, all their internal apps in VB/C# storing their data on SQL Server (or Oracle running on Windows Server) you'll have a hard time selling anything much different. It's always easier to upgrade to a newer release of Windows than to Linux or OSX.

Microsoft has perfected the art of vendor lock-in. I believe only IBM's zOS customers "enjoy" a similar situation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by powertower on Thursday January 23, 2014 @06:32PM (#7112255)
Or perhaps it's because they have solutions, features, industry leading backwards-compatibility, competent support channels, and a slew of other things - that their nearest competitor does not have.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by code_duck on Friday January 24, 2014 @12:24AM (#7113465)
I assume you mean their nearest competitor for consumer and small to medium business desktop operating systems? Because that statement isn't true for say, mobile phones, video game systems, cloud services, or database, enterprise, and web server software.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by MichaelGG on Friday January 24, 2014 @04:12AM (#7114023)
Right, now that Postgres 9.3 just added materialized views, perhaps they'll have a super-easy system for replication, DR, and HA.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by code_duck on Friday January 24, 2014 @02:26PM (#7117209)
Microsoft offers product to compete at many different levels of the market. Postgres is their competition for some needs, but I would think that if you need more advanced features like you mention it would be more of a comparison to Oracle and db2.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by BlackDeath3 on Thursday January 23, 2014 @06:15PM (#7112144)
"We have to make them need us!"
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by awada on Thursday January 23, 2014 @06:14PM (#7112142)
Is it easier to switch from the LAMP stack or RoR to other platforms? Or Java to other languages? Switching costs are always high in technology, not sure what your point is. Not to mention there are no credible better alternatives to AD and Exchange except maybe hand over all and data to a third party with G apps.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Sec... by rbanffy on Thursday January 23, 2014 @09:03PM (#7112944)
If you want to switch from LAMP on Red Hat to LAMP on Ubuntu or even on Windows, it's easy because most, if not all, of the pieces are there. It's not so with Windows desktop or web apps - the pieces are proprietary and many of them don't run on anything other than Windows.
[ Parent | on HN ]