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> Windows as a server OS is as dead as OS/2 was 5 years ago. Take a look at the typical server room at a typical small-to-medium business, and most servers (vi

by krylon 9y ago

> Windows as a server OS is as dead as OS/2 was 5 years ago. Take a look at the typical server room at a typical small-to-medium business, and most servers (virtual or physical) you are going to find run Windows. And a fair amount of those machines run Windows because they run some third-party application that is only available on Windows. Much as I would like to agree with you on this, outside the cloud arena, Windows Server has a significant market share and will continue do so, even if it is only because of inertia. > the (IMO archaic) SQL Server Also, as much as I like Postgres, SQL Server is the one piece of software from Microsoft I really do like. It is very stable, offers good performance, and the fact that T-SQL offers a unified query and procedural language makes working with it fairly pleasant. It has its pitfalls (I once managed to paralyze our ERP system with a stuck transaction), but I strongly suspect other RDBMS have their own pitfalls. The price tag on SQL Server makes me want to faint, when I think about it, but keep in mind that from Microsoft's perspective they are not competing with MySQL or Postgres, but with Oracle and DB2, which to my knowledge are at least as expensive, if not more so. > MS has a huge problem with lack of open source support Okay, this we can easily agree on. ;-)

forgotpassagan 9y ago
I once worked at a hybrid IT/consulting shop. A lot of companies still run Windows Server, but the space is being rapidly cannibalized by cloud services. In the few years I worked there we had already lost maybe 20% of our IT contracts to customers moving to cloud services like Office365 and Google for work. Custom software as a business is still thriving but basically everything new is running on cloud (and not Windows) at the clients request. Which means no Windows Server and related service contract revenue. Quite a large percentage of our IT contracts were conversion contracts to move companies to cloud services, and I assume it's only gotten worse in the years since then. Windows Server has decent market share because of inertia but I would bet money that it's in an irreversible decline. MS has been taking the unusual step of making their server software like SQL Server and .NET Core run on native Linux, so it seems they've seen the end coming as well. I agree with you that SQL Server is a good product. Far better than other 'legacy' databases like Oracle and DB2. The problem is that the paid contract model is dying. There's tons of mature and free SQL databases, and for the average project you only need so many features. SQL is such a mature tech that most projects could use any SQL database. The differentiation is gone, so there's no longer a reason to pay.

by krylon 9y ago

forgotpassagan 9y ago

I once worked at a hybrid IT/consulting shop. A lot of companies still run Windows Server, but the space is being rapidly cannibalized by cloud services. In the few years I worked there we had already lost maybe 20% of our IT contracts to customers moving to cloud services like Office365 and Google for work. Custom software as a business is still thriving but basically everything new is running on cloud (and not Windows) at the clients request. Which means no Windows Server and related service contract revenue. Quite a large percentage of our IT contracts were conversion contracts to move companies to cloud services, and I assume it's only gotten worse in the years since then. Windows Server has decent market share because of inertia but I would bet money that it's in an irreversible decline. MS has been taking the unusual step of making their server software like SQL Server and .NET Core run on native Linux, so it seems they've seen the end coming as well. I agree with you that SQL Server is a good product. Far better than other 'legacy' databases like Oracle and DB2. The problem is that the paid contract model is dying. There's tons of mature and free SQL databases, and for the average project you only need so many features. SQL is such a mature tech that most projects could use any SQL database. The differentiation is gone, so there's no longer a reason to pay.