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Comment by pcunite | Hacker News Reader

What Microsoft has done today is prove they're very focused about providing a top of the line personal computing experience. You can argue about server, but when it comes to applications (which are floating windows), Microsoft Windows has proven they can keep that title for their operating system.

I'm glad to see them take ownership over the hardware. That has always been the black mark. I build my own PCs and always bought ThinkPad to keep the good experience. Now, Microsoft can help others who don't or can't do that.

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Microsoft's server software is actually top-notch and has been for years. Server 2003 was rough, but after that MS really started improving the management tools and allowing a lot more command line via powershell, etc.

And in corporate America, Microsoft's Server products are near-ubiquitous. Consider that most of the in-house workflow tools at any company are built in Sharepoint -- and Sharepoint is actually a great platform for business apps (and easy to hire developers for). Exchange/Outlook/Lync is a great corporate collaboration suite that mostly "just works". And from what I've seen, Google Apps isn't really a threat for Microsoft -- it's largely just displacing Lotus Notes at the bottom end of the market.

At the risk of sounding overly snarky: Top-notch does not mean putting the Goddamned Metro UI, a thing for users on touch screens, on a Goddamned SERVER OS like they did with 2012.

It's insanity. Every time I have to RDP into a 2012 machine, I cringe a bit. Whoever was responsible for that decision should be shot, and the corpse fired.

For all Microsoft has been doing to improve their standing lately, they still make some rather absurd missteps...

Yeah, the UI is shit, though in the next server release they're adding native PowerShell over SSH, so hopefully you should never have to log in to one again.

will I need a CAL to SSH in?

..what's sad is that this is a completely legitimate question :(

I thought MS had mostly done away with CALs? I haven't been in an environment without Enterprise Software Assurance for a while, but I thought they were actively moving even their SMB customers over to SA licensing as well. No idea how far their plans got though...

By definition of how Windows Server is still licensed, yes, you will. Anyone using any resource hosted on a Windows Server system (with exception to public websites) needs a CAL.

There's been remoting in powershell since V2 the only cool thing about SSH is linux gets to join the party. And that is very cool

Have you actually tried to use Powershell remoting? When you try to do remote automation on Windows machines you land in this Bizarro world where some things work with psexec, some with remoting, and some not at all.

A working, secure protocol where things actually execute on the remote machine will be very welcome, and when we think SSH that's what we're excited about.

(The hit-and-miss nonsense I'm talking about was a script that reached out to a collection of machines, shut down a Win service, set it to "manual", deleted its log file, then set it back to auto, then started the service. It was a hodge-podge of psexec, remotable commandlets, and Powershell remoting. There may have been whiffs of WinRM in there too, but I'm trying to forget it.)

The only hassle I've had is trying to use external resources while already in a session. e.g. enter-pssession "someserver"; copy-item "\\netshare" .

In thins case you need to further enable CredSSP on your domain to allow passing on your auth credentials through the session to the third machine.

Any cmdlet I've seen that doesn't take a session (wmi or cim) I've just wrapped up into invoke-expression -computername "commands..."

Ps remoting lets me do great things like import module from servers to clients that I don't have remote tools installed on. e.eg. $session = new-cimInstance "domainController"; import-module activedirectory -sessions $session

We just upgraded to Office 2013 and the colors in Outlook are killing me. Microsoft basically gives you three themes which are basically some form of a light white/grey background.

I don't understand how this color scheme made it out of QA testing without someone complaining about it.

I had the same issue and ultimately fount the solution. I forced myself to use Office 2013 and avoided being exposed to earlier versions with much better contrast, in particular Office 2003.

In a few weeks of immersive experience, you will see that your body will start accepting Office 2013 and you will not notice the lack of contrast anymore.

I've found it much easier to navigate Windows 2012, Windows 8 and Windows 10 with just the keyboard than past versions. Maybe because it has forced me to learn some of the short cuts but I also think the commands have become more powerful.

I haven't RDPed into a server for at least a year. Do everything with WinRM and powershell remoting and DSC. All our kit is 2012 R2 core.

It does suck on a server though big time.

I wish I had down voting ability , You would be my best candidate for down voting.

And this is why most people on HN can't down vote comments.

And why the people who can get to decide who can’t.

really? How's that work? Or is it just a subset?

When you get enough points (and maybe hasn't been too annoying?) you get downvote privilege.

I think the point is to force people to lurk around a while before they can downvote anything.

The point is mostly to make sure people are feeling as part of the community by the time they get downvote privilege, and downvote based on what contributes and what doesn’t.

Ah. My question is regarding this:

> And why the people who can get to decide who can’t.

How does someone with downvote privileges get to decide who can't downvote? Simply because a downvote removes a unit of karma from the downvotee's score?

Correct. If your Karma is below a specific value, I think 1000 or something, you can’t downvote.

> Lync... "just works"

Those are two things that I would never say together. Lync is great if you are all on Windows within the same building or campus perhaps, but the video quality is horrible compared to Google Hangout or (consumer) Skype for cross country and international communication.

Also: Lync is now called "Skype for Business" and old Lync will be sunsetted per http://research.gigaom.com/2014/11/microsoft-announces-skype...

Depends on how you build it out, but yeah I do agree that Lync/SfB is the weak point in the suite. But the Exchange/Outlook combo is the gold standard for corporate communication.

No. It does not depend on how you build it out. Lync sucks, period, and has for a long time. Similarly, Sharepoint sucks irredeemably. It looks and acts like bad 1990s software. It's consistently the most painful, frustrating part of my workflow, and I use it as little as I can possibly get away with.

Next time you want to defend the full Microsoft software suite, just don't mention Lync and Sharepoint, and your argument will do better.

Sharepoint is a core part of it; and while I agree that Sharepoint is awful, it's a necessary evil that's better than the alternative.

Sharepoint just generally sucks because it's a platform for building one-off custom apps that part of your accounting department uses. Any platform with that use case is going to suck. But maintaining a Sharepoint environment is a lot easier than maintaining 30-40 individual web apps running on separate Linux machines, and it's a lot more maintainable of a business process than doing everything in an Access database or a shared Excel file.

It's also just flat-out ubiquitous. It really doesn't matter how much Sharepoint sucks because nearly every company uses it in some form.

I think you been living in a Microsoft world for to long. Many companies use far more Linux servers then Microsoft.

For sheer number, you're almost certainly right. But Microsoft products lie at the center of nearly every major company in the form of Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Linux guy and have been for a long time. If you want to build a product, Linux is definitely the way to go. But for a corporate IT platform providing applications and communications tools to business users? TCO is the name of the game; and while license costs for Microsoft products may be higher, you're going to get a lot fewer support requests because end users are capable of diagnosing and fixing far more issues on Windows/Office than Linux.

I think I'd argue against Sharepoint simply because of the investment and vendor lock-in required. You do have an extremely solid point about Google Apps at the bottom end because of this exact reason though.

I only wish the O365 platform was more stable. I had endless issues when I tried to setup a paltry 50 accounts from a different managed Exchange platform. We ended up with using the Office products using the O365 license (cost of 2013/2015 products was far too high to justify individual licenses), but switching Exchange back to the previous provider.

Also, when it comes to high availability, there isn't much that can beat the ease of SQL Server's HA solutions. I personally greatly prefer PostgreSQL over everything, but there is no doubt in my mind that MSSQL is a solid platform.

Well, with any Intranet software you're going to have some element of vendor lock-in. Sharepoint has at least been around for a long time and gone through a number of major functionality upgrades. I have a new appreciation for Sharepoint after seeing too many of my clients using collaboration software that is either homegrown (and the developer left 5 years ago, which is when new feature development stopped) or no longer supported by the vendor.

And I agree with your points about SQL Server as well. It's not very popular in the hacker community to talk about licensed database products, but SQL server is rock solid and far less annoying to configure/test/deploy than Oracle.

> Microsoft's server software is actually top-notch and has been for years.

I disagree because I think there's a lot more important things to a server than those tools. What I want from a server is versatility. I want to learn one server OS and use it for all of my server needs (for the most part). I can't do that with Windows Server because it's not a good platform for non-Microsoft technologies.

By that logic, wouldn't most/all server OS' be considered not very good? Linux isn't really a good platform for Microsoft technologies...

If all you plan to do is develop applications for the web, then go for Linux.

If you ever plan to step foot into corporate IT, you're going to have to deal with Windows because Linux is a bad platform for Microsoft technologies -- and most corporate IT departments exist to deliver Microsoft technologies to end users. Exchange, Outlook, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Sharepoint, etc. are the standard in the corporate world, and there really aren't any other applications that measure up.

I've been the linux guy in many meetings arguing for Exchange/Outlook and AD. Those two tools are best of breed by far. AD is a HUGE standout when it comes to centralized AAA controls.

Sharepoint is sharepoint. It just doesn't suck as much as everything else.

Top notch as in they can't add HTTP/2 to IIS without upgrading the entire OS? Yeah...

Exchange/Outlook/Lync are amazing, sure. (Lync destroys other PBX software.) But Windows as a platform, outside of managing a large company's internal IT is really not so fantastic.

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