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Comment by nextweek2 | Hacker News Reader

Because its aimed at enterprises that have Microsoft OS's and applications. Those buyers are used to paying a premium and know they don't have to retrain staff.

You need to consider that the bulk of developers are actually using the Microsoft platform. For the most part they aren't interested in the free software community. Linux VMs are not an option for a lot of corporate tasks.

That is of course changing and probably the main driver for Microsoft being more open.

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For what its worth - "More than 20% of Azure VMs run on Linux" (Oct 2014) [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/msftnews/status/524262781592539136

Hm. 1000% sure it's a Sales tactic. Price it high and cut "deals" for clients. Oldest trick in the book.

They're a lot more cooperative around BigCorp compliance related stuff than AWS. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it really is.

Oh yeah, that's for sure huge, but BigCorp isn't paying market price per container. I'm talking about the sales tactics played out against the little guy.

Yeah, you can get rather large discounts if you are a large customer or commit to X amount a year.

Or if you become a registered partner. No certifications necessary, it's a few hundred bucks a year, and there are many other benefits for MS-focused devs/consultants.

Is that really true? I thought Java and .NET had pretty comparable mindshare in the enterprise server-side world. Certainly Windows desktops rule but line of business web apps are often J2EE on RHEL/CentOS. Or is that not true anymore?

> Or is that not true anymore?

No, it's still true. Java's market share of server-side applications is enormous.

I imagine if the enterprise is running JVM based stuff they wouldn't use Azure. I think the point is, is that most of enterprise has used Microsoft before. While it might be more expensive, its a safe bet for them to stick with Microsoft even when moving to the cloud.

The number of times I've seen enterprises deploy Windows servers running Java on them is probably equal to the times I've seen it in production on Linux. Windows system administrators are easy to find in enterprise space and the process of keeping them fed and happy is really cut and dry compared to the myriad of options (read: ways to fail when you're as dysfunctional as most F500 organizations) on a UNIX variant. When you have both Java and C# developers but don't want to spend the money on both Linux and Windows computer janitors, your pick Windows for standardization of OSes, not Linux.

The lack of choice is liberating for enterprises constantly in a state of analysis paralysis over every random software requirement that could sink their ball of twine software stacks.

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