I've worked at a true bigco (you've used their products) that ran acres of Microsoft desktops. Angostura is correct. Just because bigco mgmt found Windows to

I've worked at a true bigco (you've used their products) that ran acres of Microsoft desktops. Angostura is correct. Just because bigco mgmt found Windows to be the most suitable desktop for them, doesn't mean they'll use Microsoft products anywhere else. We used several databases, but none from Microsoft. We used several programming languages, but none from Microsoft. Suggesting either would get you laughed out of the room even quicker than suggesting a free software solution (and in fact, we did use free software for several things like this, which mgmt saw as its fortes). Managers at bigco want to minimize risk. (We used Windows 2000 until about 2006, i.e., it took a while to trust Microsoft at the one thing we thought they were good at.) When (not if) something goes wrong, they don't want the finger pointed at them. They're risk-averse to an extreme (which drives us programmers nuts), but they're not that stupid -- they know a PC OS is vastly different from a cloud platform. A brand new service from a company not known for this type of service is not minimizing risk. If they got the itch to try cloud computing, they probably would have started by calling up Oracle.