5 ms·

I couldn't agree more. I'm sitting here on a Windows desktop at the moment and have a windows phone. See elsewhere in this thread for the fate of the phone. It'

by batou 11y ago

I couldn't agree more. I'm sitting here on a Windows desktop at the moment and have a windows phone. See elsewhere in this thread for the fate of the phone. It's being replaced with a dumbphone. As for the desktop, I've got the following things open on it: firefox, thunderbird, PuTTY, Libreoffice Sheet, KeepassX, vim and virtualbox running Debian. Even my day job which is slaving for a Microsoft partner is moving away from their stuff. We're already on VMware ESX rather than Hyper-V, we're moving to AWS, adopting node.js and we already have a pile of Linux infrastructure floating around. A few years ago it was just propping us up but now it's actually delivering the core value for the company. We're also dumping Office 365 after only a year of subscriptions because it's a pile of shit (forefront letting stuff through, outlook sync is incredibly unreliable and the disaster that is Lync) and the euro position means a price rise. Plus over time, a VLK office license works out cheaper. But then again, do you need Office? Not really. And the final killer: we're getting completely gouged over and over again. Every time someone writes of several billion on shit investments, us enterprise customers get shafted to make up the numbers. Our SQL 2014 upgrade was stupid amounts of pain and money, so we're looking elsewhere. Postgresql is already on the cards to replace a chunk of our Web API service back ends, then they move to node, then they move to Linux. So when they "listen to the customer" what do we get? We get a pay pay pay app ecosystem that they fucked up the first time and the second time looks like a disaster, a bunch of cloud services that are completely non portable, a pile of devices which we no longer control and a bunch of backpedalling over their previous "open source is evil" attitude. There's just no reason now. They're a total fuck up of a company.

jvehent 11y ago
Microsoft was never a web stack company and always did a poor job at it. Their real power is in the Active Directory. It's very hard to find any decent alternative to that (and no, OpenLDAP isn't the same).
- batou 11y ago
  You're right, OpenLDAP isn't the same. It's more of a toolchain and server to build yourself a directory implementation on top of. But when we look at our organisation, all we need is simple SSO for a few applications. We don't actually need all of the extensions like GPO, management tooling etc. Incidentally this becomes cost and noise.
- frik 11y ago
  True. Microsoft originally envisioned "ActiveDirectory" (in 1994, before it got that name) to replace DNS. http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/timeline/docs/di_killerapp_InternetMemo.rtf http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/t... The original plans for dotNet were "applications as a service" in 1999 and what is known as their "Azure" cloud service platform is heading the same direction (like the plans about AD in 1994) too.
kogepathic 11y ago
> We're also dumping Office 365 after only a year of subscriptions because it's a pile of shit (forefront letting stuff through, outlook sync is incredibly unreliable and the disaster that is Lync) and the euro position means a price rise. What are you switching to? We just decided to go with Office 365 because it provided a much nicer interface for our users than Roundcube/Squirrelmail/etc. I do have some minor complaints, there have been a few times that they are slow to send or receive emails (like hours slow) but overall it works quite well. Google Apps is out because the company doesn't trust Google, so what are the alternatives for a mail service with a great web interface?
- batou 11y ago
  We're switching back to an MSP for a bit with Exchange 2013. Then we're looking at other solutions. So far this is looking like it's going to be something in house. "quite well" isn't an option for us. We need something reliable. We have had exactly that experience; things disappearing for hours at a time. There are absolutely no mail services with good web interface. This is the problem. We really want standard bits of glue that work across the board so we're looking at CalDAV, CardDAV and IMAP separately all using OpenLDAP SSO. Sharepoint is already canned; we ended up using Atlassian Confluence as we're already a JIRA user.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  Have you looked at [AWS WorkMail](https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/)?

by batou 11y ago

jvehent 11y ago

Microsoft was never a web stack company and always did a poor job at it. Their real power is in the Active Directory. It's very hard to find any decent alternative to that (and no, OpenLDAP isn't the same).

batou 11y ago
You're right, OpenLDAP isn't the same. It's more of a toolchain and server to build yourself a directory implementation on top of. But when we look at our organisation, all we need is simple SSO for a few applications. We don't actually need all of the extensions like GPO, management tooling etc. Incidentally this becomes cost and noise.
frik 11y ago
True. Microsoft originally envisioned "ActiveDirectory" (in 1994, before it got that name) to replace DNS. http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/timeline/docs/di_killerapp_InternetMemo.rtf http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/t... The original plans for dotNet were "applications as a service" in 1999 and what is known as their "Azure" cloud service platform is heading the same direction (like the plans about AD in 1994) too.

kogepathic 11y ago

> We're also dumping Office 365 after only a year of subscriptions because it's a pile of shit (forefront letting stuff through, outlook sync is incredibly unreliable and the disaster that is Lync) and the euro position means a price rise. What are you switching to? We just decided to go with Office 365 because it provided a much nicer interface for our users than Roundcube/Squirrelmail/etc. I do have some minor complaints, there have been a few times that they are slow to send or receive emails (like hours slow) but overall it works quite well. Google Apps is out because the company doesn't trust Google, so what are the alternatives for a mail service with a great web interface?

batou 11y ago
We're switching back to an MSP for a bit with Exchange 2013. Then we're looking at other solutions. So far this is looking like it's going to be something in house. "quite well" isn't an option for us. We need something reliable. We have had exactly that experience; things disappearing for hours at a time. There are absolutely no mail services with good web interface. This is the problem. We really want standard bits of glue that work across the board so we're looking at CalDAV, CardDAV and IMAP separately all using OpenLDAP SSO. Sharepoint is already canned; we ended up using Atlassian Confluence as we're already a JIRA user.
Artemis2 11y ago
Have you looked at [AWS WorkMail](https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/)?