14 ms·

>I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable. Government! Government and enterprise! Neither would function without MS!! Windows/Active Directory,

>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.

infinite8s 10y ago
It's not like everyone's deployments will just stop working if MS goes bellyup.
- gfo 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ergothus 10y ago
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.
- tw04 10y ago
  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.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    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.
    - tw04 10y ago
      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 tw04@gmail.com, I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with tw04@mydomain.com 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.
mordae 10y ago
Windows/Active Directory -- FreeIPA, Samba Windows Server -- RHEL MS SQL server -- PostgreSQL SharePoint -- let it die, useless Office -- LibreOffice, Google Apps
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  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.

infinite8s 10y ago

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

gfo 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ergothus 10y ago

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.

tw04 10y ago
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.
- ergothus 10y ago
  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.
  - tw04 10y ago
    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 tw04@gmail.com, I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with tw04@mydomain.com 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.

mordae 10y ago

Windows/Active Directory -- FreeIPA, Samba Windows Server -- RHEL MS SQL server -- PostgreSQL SharePoint -- let it die, useless Office -- LibreOffice, Google Apps

nommm-nommm 10y ago
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.