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Comment by abarringer | Hacker News Reader

Just because you run windows doesn't mean you like it. SQL Server, vendor app requirements etc. A windowless world is about as likely as a paperless bathroom and for the same reasons.

Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing?

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Not the original poster but from experience of running windows on everything for over 20 years the risks are: being treated like a criminal until you prove yourself innocent, unreliable and difficult to automate tooling, half-baked clones of ideologies as a me to proposition rather than a product direction, absolutely no support worth mentioning even when you pay for it in organs, schizophrenic roadmaps which never materialise or turn up half baked, pretending to care about the community while shitting on it with telemetry and products being yanked that you rely on. Then QA so bad that it makes me wonder if there was any. I feel like most of my time and cash investment has been thrown into putting a marketing facade over this steaming pile of feces.

Now there's a pile of legacy on top of Windows which is unavoidable but at this point I couldn't possibly consider building a product from scratch on top of something which has been basically a 20 year long bad trip. I will also push for everything to be moved off their platforms at every available opportunity.

On numerous occasions the pure frustration caused by MSFT has nearly made me quit the industry entirely.

To confirm, everything is greener on the other side. I do that too.

> Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing?

The many business risks of being 100% tied down to a single provider (Microsoft). Licensing is one, but also what would happen if Microsoft decided to kill off a service that your product depends on? You'd have to invest in finding an alternative and rewriting your software. Or what if Microsoft sells that service to another company which is actually directly competing with you, and then decides to stop providing third party access, or looks at your usage metrics/data to gain a competitive advantage over you. Or maybe Microsoft gets an incompetent CEO which drives the company to bankruptcy, and Windows and all their services you depend on are sold to hundreds of different companies which you now need to deal with.

Building your software on Linux or BSD means you don't have to worry about any of that since you own everything. It's like you're getting vertical integration for free. It's a no-brainer.

Both replies to me earlier comment mentioned vendor lock in. Is there any greater vendor lock-in then integrating AWS thousand and one services? Is it really riskier to trust MS to not kill a product then Google? Is the answer really to write everything yourself from the OS up?

I don't disagree that MS could do any of what you mentioned but I'm not sure AWS/GCP etc wouldn't be as likely to as well.

I think you misread my comment. I was talking about Windows, not Azure. As far as I know, Azure lets you run Linux on their machines, so there's no point in using Windows and locking yourself in.

You are vastly more likely to have a long, dependable platform when you use Microsoft than almost anything else. They worship backwards compatibility. Being stranded and all-alone on an open source dependency is very possible. You're vastly more likely to be stranded after using a Google open source product. I say all this having used the linux stack for my entire professional career. I prefer linux by a long shot, but Microsoft backwards compatibility is exemplary compared to almost anyone else, including open source.

Now that's some grade-A FUD

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