I totally agree here. Every time Microsoft roll out a new product or feature, it seems they go out of their way to make it as complex as possible. A lot of the

I totally agree here. Every time Microsoft roll out a new product or feature, it seems they go out of their way to make it as complex as possible. A lot of their server side products have weird restrictions or integrate with their other products in strange ways. Nothing is standardised, or simple. For example, I'm in the middle of a project that needs to log audit data from a front-end service. The service isn't that busy, so doesn't really log that much, however the reporting interface only works with System Center. So to build out the reporting infrastructure I need: 2x System Center Service Manager Management Servers, and 2x System Center Service Manager Data Warehouse Servers, and 2x SQL Servers in a live-sync arrangement. That's six servers, three in each Datacenter. Four of which need 16Gb of RAM. The Management Servers do hardly any work, but due to an artificial restriction placed in the installer, you cannot install them on the same boxes as the Data Warehouse component. Even if you could, MS wouldn't support it. All this to log no more than 100-200 events a day. To do the reporting any other way, is unsupported. It's nuts. I am starting to believe that Microsoft are now deliberately making their products so complex and so expensive to build on premises, in order to push customers into their Cloud platforms instead. This is certainly true of Exchange Server which is now an absolute nightmare to manage on premises. It's a mail server, why is it so complex?! To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if even internal Microsoft product designers and engineers no longer understand how most of the Microsoft server products even work or integrate. And I say all this as someone who's spent 25 years working with Microsoft products as my day job.