4 ms·

I wonder what drives people using Microsoft and then using more from this company. We didn’t knew it better, back then. We knew it better, now. But migratin

I wonder what drives people using Microsoft and then using more from this company. We didn’t knew it better, back then. We knew it better, now. But migrating is work. So we prefer to suffer! And harm others! This Linux and BSD people are so annoying with their desire for compatibility. They shall suffer, too! And when we buy everything from a Monopoly, we don’t need to think. Somehow. Part of the game is that you’ve always an excuse with Microsoft. You cannot made responsible? There is this quote about IBM: Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM. But I cannot remember stories about suffering from IBM forever.

dizlexic 1y ago
From what I've seen in my industry? To pass all the liability to Microsoft. "If something happens, we used enterprise grade industry standard software. We did our due diligence." This outlook is basically why we can't innovate anymore. I had to recently sit through a meeting where our CTO quoted all the "blogs" he's been reading as a way to slap down my suggestion for an in-house project. It's all about CYA.
- pphysch 1y ago
  Surely there's an untapped market for infosec liability insurance. Pay the CYA bill, let the engineers build/choose something that actually works. Win-win.
- phil21 1y ago
  I call it the liabilty fairy. It's why school boards don't do anything useful, among many many other things in our society. It's an endemic disease. Most of the time it's extremely exaggerated, but it's trotted out and used as a CYA excuse almost immediately by most in the executive/managerial class. Both due to outright laziness and incompetence, and also as just a... why take any personal risk whatsoever making actual decisions with any impact if I can keep my cushy job and career rolling by being as milquetoast as possible. Never mind you get the big bucks to make such important and controversial decisions at great personal (career) risk when some inevitably go wrong. Everyone forgot that part. Such roles should be hard, difficult, and risky.
jiggawatts 1y ago
They're using Microsoft because all of the alternatives have the same issues. FOSS isn't magically immune to vulnerabilities. It doesn't help that the FOSS community generally prefers the C programming language over more modern and safer alternatives as a cultural thing. The result is just as many vulnerabilities, if not more, per line of code or per feature. Keep in mind that SharePoint is an enormous product with a 3.6 GB ISO image used to install it. If you think anyone is able to develop that volume of server code and have zero vulnerabilities... I have a bridge to sell you.
- pentamassiv 1y ago
  Rust is very popular and quickly getting adopted. The number of Debian packages that use Rust libraries more then doubled and is now at 8% https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Debian-2025 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Debian-2025
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Rust has never been successfully used to develop large-scale software of the size of SharePoint, Exchange, or anything of that order of magnitude: gigabytes of compiled code with the main executable being 10s of megabytes in size. An observation I've made about Rust is that because it eschews OOP, it tends not to "scale" to large development teams for single applications. It's great for CLI tools, small web apps, etc... but after some scale it runs out of steam. This is exacerbated by its glacial compile times compared to other languages, even C++, let alone C#. I just can't imagine something the size of SharePoint being developed entirely in Rust!
    - ozgrakkurt 1y ago
      Gigabytes of compiled source code sounds kind of sus, considering size of chromium and linux kernel etc.
      - jiggawatts 1y ago
        Think of an app like SharePoint as "Linux Kernel + Drivers + Userspace tools". There's a few large monolithic executables some tens of megabytes in size for each of the core web apps and services, and then hundreds file format converter plugins, database drivers, etc, etc... Chromium is similar. It's practically an operating system now, it even has USB drivers! I had to compile Chromium from scratch once, for which I spun up a 120-core cloud VM with 456 GB of memory so that it wouldn't take all day. With Rust... that would take all week even on that box.

dizlexic 1y ago

From what I've seen in my industry? To pass all the liability to Microsoft. "If something happens, we used enterprise grade industry standard software. We did our due diligence." This outlook is basically why we can't innovate anymore. I had to recently sit through a meeting where our CTO quoted all the "blogs" he's been reading as a way to slap down my suggestion for an in-house project. It's all about CYA.

pphysch 1y ago
Surely there's an untapped market for infosec liability insurance. Pay the CYA bill, let the engineers build/choose something that actually works. Win-win.
phil21 1y ago
I call it the liabilty fairy. It's why school boards don't do anything useful, among many many other things in our society. It's an endemic disease. Most of the time it's extremely exaggerated, but it's trotted out and used as a CYA excuse almost immediately by most in the executive/managerial class. Both due to outright laziness and incompetence, and also as just a... why take any personal risk whatsoever making actual decisions with any impact if I can keep my cushy job and career rolling by being as milquetoast as possible. Never mind you get the big bucks to make such important and controversial decisions at great personal (career) risk when some inevitably go wrong. Everyone forgot that part. Such roles should be hard, difficult, and risky.

jiggawatts 1y ago

They're using Microsoft because all of the alternatives have the same issues. FOSS isn't magically immune to vulnerabilities. It doesn't help that the FOSS community generally prefers the C programming language over more modern and safer alternatives as a cultural thing. The result is just as many vulnerabilities, if not more, per line of code or per feature. Keep in mind that SharePoint is an enormous product with a 3.6 GB ISO image used to install it. If you think anyone is able to develop that volume of server code and have zero vulnerabilities... I have a bridge to sell you.

pentamassiv 1y ago
Rust is very popular and quickly getting adopted. The number of Debian packages that use Rust libraries more then doubled and is now at 8% https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Debian-2025 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Debian-2025
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Rust has never been successfully used to develop large-scale software of the size of SharePoint, Exchange, or anything of that order of magnitude: gigabytes of compiled code with the main executable being 10s of megabytes in size. An observation I've made about Rust is that because it eschews OOP, it tends not to "scale" to large development teams for single applications. It's great for CLI tools, small web apps, etc... but after some scale it runs out of steam. This is exacerbated by its glacial compile times compared to other languages, even C++, let alone C#. I just can't imagine something the size of SharePoint being developed entirely in Rust!
  - ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    Gigabytes of compiled source code sounds kind of sus, considering size of chromium and linux kernel etc.
    - jiggawatts 1y ago
      Think of an app like SharePoint as "Linux Kernel + Drivers + Userspace tools". There's a few large monolithic executables some tens of megabytes in size for each of the core web apps and services, and then hundreds file format converter plugins, database drivers, etc, etc... Chromium is similar. It's practically an operating system now, it even has USB drivers! I had to compile Chromium from scratch once, for which I spun up a 120-core cloud VM with 456 GB of memory so that it wouldn't take all day. With Rust... that would take all week even on that box.