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Comment by wulczer | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, those other companies like Walmart, UPS, Boeing... you know, the ones based outside of Silicon Valley, deeply entrenched in the real world.

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What is the incentive to the Redis developers in expanding their target audience to include enterprises, which generally demand a vastly different feature set?

I totally disagree as I work in a large enterprise that is a Microsoft shop and I would love to run Redis for some of our up and coming projects.

Why? Why don't you use Microsoft SQL Server? I mean, your company decided that for sound economic reasons, Microsoft is the way to go. You did read all those reports that even though linux is free, it has a much higher TCO than Windows. Why do you think the same is not true of Redis? I think you are one of those malcontents that is not aware of economic reality. Sure, Redis can probably do on one box what will take months of tuning several SQL Server boxes. But that's the great lie of linux. It just looks easier to begin with. Much better to just pay Microsoft, and have a technology monoculture. It keeps staff costs down too.

How far do you need to go down the list of top websites by traffic before you hit a site running on a Windows stack that isn't owned by Microsoft? Quite a long way, I believe. Probably more than 50.

There's more to software development than websites.

wasn't ebay on a MS stack? I'm reasonably sure it's in the top 50 (especially if you consider the various google.* and yahoo.* as single properties).

Do you have any data on that?

I only have two data points: I've contracted for two Fortune 10 companies. Both companies had Windows on the Desktop. But their Big Data / Big Iron was linux and solaris. Indeed the license managers (FlexLM) that authorized software for those desktops? Solaris.

Needless to say both of these companies were outside silicon valley.

So do you have data on that? Just doing some googling it seems that Walmart started out as an IBM shop, more recently Oracle and HP are mentioned. Are walmart buying Microsoft licenses to run Oracle on the HP boxes? I mean, they could be, but I think it would be unreasonable to assume that is the case.

1) Amazon is not Silicon Valley.

2) I am rather interested to hear what you mean by "deeply entrenched in the real world". Are Google's and Amazon's profits somehow not real?

The parent of the post I responded to argued that Linux has not "won the software deployment war". I happen to agree with that and I believe that throwing out a few examples of technology companies that do deploy their software on Linux is not a convincing argument.

The way my GP alleged that no big companies use Windows as a platform came off as snarky and represents what I think is a skewed, SV/web-startup centric point of view.

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