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Comment by frankohn | Hacker News Reader

> I particularly love iActive Directory, iExchange, iSQLserver, iDynamics ERP, iTeams. Apples office products are the reason noone uses Excel any more.

I see your sarcasm backfire as most you are listing is just Microsoft dog-food with no real usefulness. The only good thing in your list is Excel, all the rest is bloatware. Teams is a resource hog that serve no useful purpose. Skype was perfectly fine to send messages or have some video call.

I admit I don't have experience as an IT administator but things like managing emails, accounts, database, manage remote computers can be done with well estalished tools from the linux/BSD world.

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> I don’t have experience as an IT Admin

Wild that you’d write this comment with such a confident voice then.

I worked at a company who’s IT team managed both windows and Mac computers and apparently MS’s ActiveDirectory is leagues ahead of apple’s offering. Which makes sense. MS is selling windows to administrators, not to users

I'm a die hard FOSS guy, but as someone who has done LDAP work with FreeIPA and OpenLDAP -- AD does a better job.

Admittidly, it's mostly a better job at integrating with Microsoft-powered systems, so it should damn well do a better job, but it's a core business offering and has polish on it in ways that many FOSS offerings don't.

disclaimer: haven't done FreeIPA and LDAP work in the last ~3 years, maybe they got better.

I would disagree. I work in healthcare and we’ve always used SQL Server. While I wouldn’t pick it, it’s been reliable and integrates with auth.

No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

No one loves OneDrive but it works.

I think people underestimate how much work it would take to integrate services, train people, and meet compliance requirements when using a handful of the best in class products instead of MS Suite.

> No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

Of course there's a cost, its just hidden and you are forced to pay it. Microsoft used its monopoly position to move into a new market.

Yeah, sure. But the marginal cost is zero, whereas a Slack subscription for every person in our org will cost about 1 million dollars a year. And it doesn’t integrate as well with every other piece of functional but mediocre software.

The person approving the $1 million dollar budget item doesn’t really care that Teams isn’t “free” in the sense that there is no free lunch, and while they perhaps have moral qualms of antitrust, that’s outside their purview. We’re locked into Office suite and right now there is no extra charge for Teams.

Which is why the legal process is simply too slow for big tech

Microsoft did a massively illegal thing (again) and got away with it

Time to hold companies responsible for their suppliers.

People use Teams and OneDrive because it’s “Free” when you use Office. IMO, that’s a bit of an anti-trust problem. Both have good competitors (arguably better competitors) that are getting squeezed because of the monopoly pricing with Office.

But with SQL Server, on the other hand, I think you are right. It is a good piece of software. But it also has high quality competition from multiple vendors. Some of it enterprise (Oracle, DB2), some of it FOSS (Postgres, MySQL). Because of this, it has to be better quality to survive… they couldn’t bundle it to get market share, it actually had to compete.

People use Teams because it's well integrated into Office, 365, Entra and other MS products, they would (and recently do) pay for it. It has functionalities that no other alternative has, e.g. it can act as a full call centre solution through a SIP gateway.

"Well integrated" is honestly a stretch, but it is fair to say it's integrated with no extra setup.

How to manage Slack access control via Azure AD groups? Even the most basic integrations are missing in other options...

Word, no one uses teams because its great. The only reason it's used is because it's bundled with $M365.

> Teams is a resource hog that serve no useful purpose. Skype was perfectly fine to send messages or have some video call.

I’m sorry, this is a very silly take. I’m no fan of Teams or Slack but I can’t deny the functionality they offer, which is far above and beyond what Skype does.

> I admit I don’t have experience as an IT administrator

Well, quite.

Time was, NeXT was a hard sell into corporations because it required so little administration, and what there was was so easily done IT staffs were hugely cut back after implementing them.

I'd be glad to see Apple bring those tools back.

Looks fondly over at the old black pizza box

Had to move my Cube this past week-end, and it made me incredibly sad.

Using a NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ and an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint (and rebooting into Windows for Pen Computing when I wanted to run Futurewave Smartsketch) was the high-water mark of my computing experience.

It was elegant, consistent, reliable, and "just worked" in a way no computer has since (and I had such high hopes for Rhapsody and the Mac OS Public Beta).

> I don't have experience as an IT administator

Then you probably shouldn't speak on software exclusively understood and administered by IT administrators. I've worked in IT for some time and every single one of those products(aside from Dynamics) have been the most important parts of our administrative stack.

Even Excel is beginning to be regarded as a dangerous piece of software that gives the illusion of power while silently bankrupting departments who depend on the idea that large spreadsheets is an accurate and reliable way to analyze large/complex datasets.

the 90ies are over but for some reason average enterprise department have a problem internalizing the fact that the demands today is different then they were 25 years ago.

Meanwhile, while HN bubble imagines people doing big data jobs on Excel, in the real world 10s or 100s of millions of people are perfectly satisfied doing small data jobs in Excel.

The problem is that without tools and processes to systematically validate those result's people might be perfectly happy about completely inaccurate results.

I know i have had to correct one in three excel sheet i have ever gone over using pen and paper in order to validate the results but i am a paranoid sod who actually do this kind of exercise on a regular basis.

almost all of the disciplines known to rely on excel have a serous issue with repeatability of results either because nobody ever attempts it, or because it's a messy field without a well defined methodology.

I work in finance. We have double entry accounting and literal checks and balances to validate our results. It is not a messy field, and has a well defined methodology. We have been the biggest spreadsheet users at many of the companies I have worked with.

"I admit I don't have experience as an IT administator"

Then just hit the back button.

SQL Server ran and runs a lot of big company (it ran MySpace!) however, everything else in your list is hot trash and should be yeeted into the sun.

StackOverflow runs on SQL Server.

Yeah, but Microsoft's been trying to convince them to move to Azure's stuff for years, so who knows :)

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