4 ms·

To be honest not a lot of our users and administrators have actually been happy in the MS ecosystem. There are a few outliers, some licensing middlemen, a few M

To be honest not a lot of our users and administrators have actually been happy in the MS ecosystem. There are a few outliers, some licensing middlemen, a few MSPs and a couple of hardcore Excel number crunchers that use the Axapta or Dynamics connectors. But you can find those anywhere like with SAS and SPSS. A lot of users don't really care at all so that just makes it a cost and 'does it do the bare minimum'-deal for them. A few people that really invest and enjoy a specific application does not make it great, especially when it turns our they are just doing more than they should be doing; i.e. when you have an InDesign professional that would be typesetting materials for publication but the person that writes the copy is also trying to 'typeset' the source in Word. It's great if you then feel like Word gets you cool typeset documents as a power user, but if 9999 people in a 10k company don't do that and just let the publication team do that properly in InDesign according to the media standards, it's no reason to keep it as a default available application. A lot of the usage comes from "well, it was already there so I went and did it in that". Not because it was actually the standard, best choice or in scope of the task that was supposed to be done. Same goes for things like notes and documentation: - Code-level docs go in the repo (MD, RST mostly) - Org-level docs go in the wiki (Confluence) - Publications are delivered as copy to the publication team which then uses the DTP/typesetting thing of choice Yet someone who would ignore that creates extra work by doing it in a different application first, then copying it around and converting it. That means that the person/process needs to be fixed, and doesn't mean we need Word as an expensive WordPad/Pages replacement. Now, this might not apply to things like mini-orgs inside a bigger org, or very small companies and individuals. But I wasn't writing about those anyway ;-) At that level you don't really have the size and scope to make good choices anyway, and you're best off just sticking with one big vendor, not because they are the best, but because you won't be handling multi-vendor management anyway.

jiggawatts 5y ago
> couple of hardcore Excel number crunchers Well, you see... that's just it. There is no direct substitute for Excel offered by any other vendor. Similarly, PowerBI has no direct competition with even a tenth of the capabilities. Before then Analysis Services + Excel was absolutely the best, and nothing else could hold a candle to it. Active Directory + Group Policy had no viable competition, and still doesn't. For orgs that must be on-prem only, Microsoft Exchange only had Lotus Domino as a vaguely equivalent competitor. There are no open-source equivalents. InTune + Windows + Azure AD + Hello 4 Business is hard to beat. You can assemble a mish-mash of vaguely compatible products, but it's a lot of work. MS Teams is hard to beat for large enterprises because of the deep integrations. Etc...
- oneplane 5y ago
  There are plenty of substitute for everything, it's just that people don't like change. We have just as many hardcore Databricks users that wouldn't want to move, or hardcore MATLAB users and Mathematica users. We don't have anyone using PowerBI anymore, those all moved to Databricks and Tableau. Active Directory and GP are a burning trashfire and only can't be replaced if you're stuck without modern MDM on a Windows Desktop construction. The only Windows we have left is VDI based on Citrix and Ivanti, everything else is "do whatever you want" where users have a BYOD choice with no internal access (and in reality they don't need it anyway) or VPN access with a choice of Kolide-based compliance or MDM-based compliance, and either are used to gate connections, in combination with DLP and standard anti malwares. InTune sucks, Azure AD is nice, but when attempting to integrate with everything that already exists it sucks again. We have everything that is fully-managed or half-managed on JAMF and everything else is just isolated or internet-only (which was a requirement starting 2 years ago anyway). MS Teams never got a foothold here, sucks in so many ways people just rather have physical meetings or use email. Slack on the other hand works well and has been in constant use for over 5 years now. On-prem exchange was deleted and migrated to Google's thing a few years ago, works fine, does everything we need for quite a low price and quite high user happiness. It also ended up being the directory replacement. We no longer need Kerberos, except for some legacy Windows-desktop applications, but those are stuck inside VDI anyway until we can move on. We used to have large VMware server farms and physical oracle boxes too. The first category was moved to AWS or replaced with microservices on Kubernetes, the second one migrated to Postgres RDS in AWS, but that is an ongoing process (roughly 10TB in table size done so far, and yes that did take tweaks like adding actual indices where Oracle would automagically do that on Exadata machines for you). Even with the human investment the cost is lower, productivity higher and we are less constrained by contracts. The best part is the elasticity we gained which was always problematic, even with the fake cloud (vmware-on-aws for example) or pretend-to-be-hybrid cloud solutions (azure) that never bear the fruit they advertise, or do but aren't actually better in the end. Perhaps a big difference between the projects at this company and others is the vertical integration where things that are distinguishing to the company are pretty much created from scratch by internal development and maintenance teams. Things that don't matter or are shit no matter how you do it (looking at VDI) are delegated to MSPs but they have to run on our infra so we know the state of the infra no matter what the MSP is trying to tell/sell us. At the end of the day, this works great for us, everyone is happy, and a profit is made. This is in Western Europe if that makes a difference.

jiggawatts 5y ago

> couple of hardcore Excel number crunchers Well, you see... that's just it. There is no direct substitute for Excel offered by any other vendor. Similarly, PowerBI has no direct competition with even a tenth of the capabilities. Before then Analysis Services + Excel was absolutely the best, and nothing else could hold a candle to it. Active Directory + Group Policy had no viable competition, and still doesn't. For orgs that must be on-prem only, Microsoft Exchange only had Lotus Domino as a vaguely equivalent competitor. There are no open-source equivalents. InTune + Windows + Azure AD + Hello 4 Business is hard to beat. You can assemble a mish-mash of vaguely compatible products, but it's a lot of work. MS Teams is hard to beat for large enterprises because of the deep integrations. Etc...

oneplane 5y ago
There are plenty of substitute for everything, it's just that people don't like change. We have just as many hardcore Databricks users that wouldn't want to move, or hardcore MATLAB users and Mathematica users. We don't have anyone using PowerBI anymore, those all moved to Databricks and Tableau. Active Directory and GP are a burning trashfire and only can't be replaced if you're stuck without modern MDM on a Windows Desktop construction. The only Windows we have left is VDI based on Citrix and Ivanti, everything else is "do whatever you want" where users have a BYOD choice with no internal access (and in reality they don't need it anyway) or VPN access with a choice of Kolide-based compliance or MDM-based compliance, and either are used to gate connections, in combination with DLP and standard anti malwares. InTune sucks, Azure AD is nice, but when attempting to integrate with everything that already exists it sucks again. We have everything that is fully-managed or half-managed on JAMF and everything else is just isolated or internet-only (which was a requirement starting 2 years ago anyway). MS Teams never got a foothold here, sucks in so many ways people just rather have physical meetings or use email. Slack on the other hand works well and has been in constant use for over 5 years now. On-prem exchange was deleted and migrated to Google's thing a few years ago, works fine, does everything we need for quite a low price and quite high user happiness. It also ended up being the directory replacement. We no longer need Kerberos, except for some legacy Windows-desktop applications, but those are stuck inside VDI anyway until we can move on. We used to have large VMware server farms and physical oracle boxes too. The first category was moved to AWS or replaced with microservices on Kubernetes, the second one migrated to Postgres RDS in AWS, but that is an ongoing process (roughly 10TB in table size done so far, and yes that did take tweaks like adding actual indices where Oracle would automagically do that on Exadata machines for you). Even with the human investment the cost is lower, productivity higher and we are less constrained by contracts. The best part is the elasticity we gained which was always problematic, even with the fake cloud (vmware-on-aws for example) or pretend-to-be-hybrid cloud solutions (azure) that never bear the fruit they advertise, or do but aren't actually better in the end. Perhaps a big difference between the projects at this company and others is the vertical integration where things that are distinguishing to the company are pretty much created from scratch by internal development and maintenance teams. Things that don't matter or are shit no matter how you do it (looking at VDI) are delegated to MSPs but they have to run on our infra so we know the state of the infra no matter what the MSP is trying to tell/sell us. At the end of the day, this works great for us, everyone is happy, and a profit is made. This is in Western Europe if that makes a difference.