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I don't think Bryan is being lax with history at all. In fact, he completely nailed it. The only points in your comment that I found persuasive, on the other hand, are that Windows is indeed becoming irrelevant, SQL Server probably has an edge over MySQL in some ways, and Exchange needs to die a quick death. The rest just doesn't fly.

Hatred for Microsoft doesn't exist any longer? Says who? I believe it runs much deeper and stronger than you realize. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in well over a decade, and that "purchase" was a PC preloaded with an OEM license of Windows that I had no way of not buying. My loathing for Microsoft was sown over decades of the most user-hostile, winner-take-all, I-will-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck corporate culture I've ever witnessed. Bryan calling Microsoft "predatory" is being kind.

I'm not sure what "OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years" refers to, but if you're talking about desktop computing, they are doing exactly the opposite of gaining traction: http://twitpic.com/a31jis They aren't just becoming irrelevant to the elite; Microsoft is rapidly becoming just plain irrelevant.

How does C#'s popularity debunk Bryan's entire argument? A lot of companies still use Windows (for now), which means a lot of people use C# to develop applications for those computers. I don't see how this debunks much of anything.

SQL Server is good. Is it better than MySQL in some ways? Sure. What are the chances I'd select SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL? Zero percent. So that's a false equivalence right there, but that's besides the point. The reason people use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server is that you don't need Windows. Why tie yourself to a user-hostile company that's only going to charge you ad infinitum upgrades for a malware-ridden operating system? Even if SQL Server were heads-and-shoulders above MySQL/PostgreSQL, people would avoid it because you can't get it without Windows.

As I said, Bryan really nailed this: you're either burned so badly by Microsoft that "hatred" doesn't even begin to describe your feelings, or you're apathetic because the world has moved on and Microsoft continues to pretend like they live in the 1990s. With Ballmer at the helm, steering Microsoft towards seemingly inevitable obsolescence, Microsoft appears destined to eventually join Wang, Sun, RIM, Nokia, and the other dead or soon-to-be-dead. It didn't have to end that way, but reaping what you sow is generally the way the world works.

Although I agree with all of your emotions because I share many of them, certain of your comments have me wondering how much time you have spent around big corporates.

Microsoft is to this day, beyond pervasive. I have over a decades worth of experience in data analysis, systems analysis, business intelligence and software design and I have never been in a big corporate office that does not use exchange, Outlook is de facto, period.

Clearly then all of those desktops are windows boxes.

With the release of MSBI as a competitor to all of the top flight BI suites that pretty much comes bundles with MSSQL... Watch this space - MS will be ubiquitous in BI within the next decade, I am an expert in the field and I have zero doubt about that.

The simple fact is that MS is still the 'safe' (define that as you will) choice for the dinosaurs that run corporate IT... The world you assert as real right now is a in my opinion a far future possible state, nothing more.

Companies using Microsoft SQL (and sometimes requiring the same from others, which is very odd) are often viewed as somewhat clueless. I think for business people, Microsoft has some positive aura (I don't really know why), but everyone else just tries to stay mostly away from them.

Personally, I wonder if enterprise BI will even exist in the next decade. I think corporate IT is on it's way out.

Of course it will - everyone needs to understand their data, how else do you think they make an informed decision? If anything this market is increasing in size, and the Microsoft suite does an excellent job of filling the mid size end of the market. Dont knock MSSQL till youve tried it because its pretty fucking awesome at the moment.

I use MSSQL every day. But that's because I'm currently working in IT for a very large company. I don't expect the job I do to exist for another 10 years so I think it's irrelevant what's popular here.

BI will, but the EDW will become less important. As long as businesses need data, there will be BI, or the same concept with a different name.

"and Exchange needs to die a quick death"

What do you propose as an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of mid-sized companies who use Exchange/Outlook now?

Google Apps my friend - even Mining companies of 2000+ staff are right now eveluating it and loving it. As for your BI statements you must have a short memory. In the last decade alone the strategy for MS BI changes every 3 years or so, products that partners have spent thousands on training etc have been cut without notice, acquisitions in the space have been squandered with very little IP making it into MS product. You must have picked the worst example to disprove the OPs argument. Open source based BI solutions have made serious progress over the last 4-5 years.

If you are seriously claiming that Exchange and Google Apps provide the same features except for the most basic, one-sentence description of those features (as in, 'they both send mail and store contacts'), you clearly don't have the slightest idea of what Exchange is or does.

Regarding the BI, I think you're mistaking me for another person in this thread, I don't know much about that, nor do I have an opinion. I'm just saying that Exchange is unique and there is nothing out there that can replace it without making very different trade-offs in the way your IT infrastructure is set up.

You have obviously never used Google Apps Premium edition. It does the bits that actually matter to users. I havent looked after Exchange since the 2007 version but am well aware what it can do.

Part of the "charm" of corporate IT is that what matters to the users isn't even part of the equation.

Do Google apps allow you to have your own server completely cut off from Google? (cos no way would the company I am in want to let google see their mail)

No you dont host the Google Apps product locally - thats the whole point of it.

Yeah, that's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of businesses. Some of them actually take confidentiality of their own and clients' data somewhat seriously. And for good reasons, too. Besides, you're not just trusting Google with your internal communications and sensitive customer data, but it's also an American corporation that's been known to willingly share data with government agencies. If you're not based in the US yourself, why place such trust? To illustrate, imagine there's a service like "Yandex Apps" (maybe there even is, I don't know), of course some businesses would not care as long as the product is good, but you can also imagine there'd be many that would be rather hesitant to host their sensitive business data on a Russian webserver on a different continent... :)

Yes, Americas National Security Letters and lawful interception laws are sparking a lot of concern over this.

Zimbra. Zimbra+Thunderbird. GoogleApps.

Do you know how Exchange works, and how Zimbra works, from a user and management point of view? (I'm not even taking GoogleApps seriously, because many organizations don't want to outsource the storage of their private data).

If yes, how can you say that they are 'similar' except for the very most basic point that users can send email with them, much like both a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Ford Model T are both 'cars'?

If no, why do you suggest them?

I find the "organizations don't want to outsource the storage of their private data" an interesting one. Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can? Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities? As far as I know Google doesnt do anything more than say a spam filtering service like MessageLabs would do - i.e. index some text to see if it should be classified as spam / malware etc. You can read their policies on this here http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...

>Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?

At least they'll know the authorities are requesting the data...

I thought voting something down was for trolls, not because you disagree...

Is that directed at me? Look at my profile: I don't have the ability to down vote.

Do you know what the word "trusted" means in the context of security?

> Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can?

Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data.

Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh ..

And even if you do trust Google with your sensitive data, do you also trust all their employees that might have access to it? http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs... And Google is a rather big corporation, if anything were to go wrong, they are notoriously hard to hold accountable.

> Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?

Well, they do not necessarily answer to the same authorities as Google does, so in some cases, yes, absolutely.

> Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data. When coupled with credibility of course it does.

> Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh .. No it wouldnt, silly argument really. You have less than zero rep.

I know how Zimbra works, yes. And I think it is a bit harsh if you call Exchange a Model T - even though the search facilities through Outlook are crap, and many Exchange instances are configured with ridiculously little mail storage (eg. 250 MB/user).

If any comment ever deserved an "El Oh El" it's surely this one.

There aren't any enterprise alternatives even though there should be one.

For instance, if RIM had half a clue and a nickel for every bad idea they've executed on they'd have built a messaging platform to compete with Microsoft.

It's obviously too late for this now, but there aren't many companies that people would trust their email to.

I recently set up an email system for a small company using cPanel, hMailserver and Thunderbird. I actually looked at Zimbra but decided to go with a Windows-based solution. I also considered Google Apps, but was afraid it wouldn't allow for fine-grained control over access permissions (i.e. managers seeing subordinates' accounts and restricted shared folders) and also unrestricted creation email aliases/accounts.

Should I have taken a closer look at GA? Thunderbird isn't the easiest to use, but I like how it's easy to work with shared IMAP folders.

GoogleApps yes

But don't waste your time with Zimbra, really

I disagree about the sense of IIS v. Apache: Apache won because of Linux not the other way around. (There is, after all, a port of Apache to Windows -- it seems to have done nothing to stop the bleeding according to Netcraft.) As for the "bizarre phenomenon" that Windows seems to be "irrelevant" despite that it's "dominant", there is of course a simple answer: it's not dominant. Windows lost; humanity won.

> Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS

That is a terrible symptom for their case. In that long term that is what will kill them. They ignore the geeks and people who eventually end up promoting technology.

For example, looking at some open source projects (say Redis), a Windows version is not even supported. Most just assume you have 'gcc' and 'make' installed and will compile the project that way.

Now they are trying to appeal to the cool kids, they got Erik Meijer, they have F# but it is just not enough.

Microsoft itself supports Redis on Windows:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/04/26/...

The major issue I see MS having is one of perception. For many long years they had "not invented here" blinders on. They have (for the most part) moved past that.

Take a look at the Web Platform Installer next time you're working on a Windows box.

Isn't it a little ironic that they don't matter to the "elites" and "geeks" and then this article was in Vanity Fair? There is another aspect of bubble bursts, there is a point in which every sort of starts to expect it. I'm of the belief that once there is some critical mass of burst acceptance, it's an inevitability.

MS isn't going away (like they tried to do to so many of their competitors) but it may never be the same again. I don't see how Windows 8 can be a big enough win to be what they need it to be; they have set the benchmark as windows everywhere, not a plurality of windows. Really, the interesting question is what does Ballmer's successor do to shake it up and get the ship back on track. He could reset "normal." He could spin some stuff out (internet and games could/should be on their own.)

>Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years.

I think this is because IT is being moved out of the enterprise. I don't think it was ever a smart fit so more and more companies are moving to "off the shelf" solutions, SaaS, etc. The best programmers are going to startups or freelancing. The people still chugging away in big firms writing code are essentially the COBOL programmers of the late 90's: just trying to grab cash as long as it lasts.

Having worked with MSSQL for 12 years, now PostgreSQL full time, I would like to hear what in your opinion is bad. Other that the lack of query parallelism, I find Postgres to be a pleasure to work with.

SQL Server is good to, and the price point comparison is correct, pending the changes being made for SQL 2012, which may change the pricing advantage somewhat.

You made his point again. In the golden Microsoft years, Exchange, SQL, SMS, etc all sucked. Really sucked. But you needed to take your medicine (aka buy the Windows platform), because the oxygen was snuffed out from the alternatives.

Today, the tools are keeping folks on the platform. That's dangerous to Microsoft's well being.

Bubbles like this have a way of collapsing so damned quickly.

I remember when Novell had an absolute lock on server software, the alternatives were all jokes, and yet one day they'd completely disappeared from the landscape, not a single server remained.

When people jumped to NT, or scrambled to Linux, there wasn't much time to respond.

What killed Novell was that their product was perhaps too good, it was frighteningly fast and extremely durable even under the worst conditions, but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could. Like you say, the only thing keeping them there was file sharing and when people moved past file sharing and on to other things, they were dead in the water.

What will make Microsoft disappear is the industry moving beyond email and groupware and "office apps" and instead to something else. What that is, maybe we just don't know yet.

> but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could.

I remember wrestling with BTreive settings on a client's NW 3.1.1 server to make Solomon (their accounting software) play nicely with ArcServe (the backup software). There's something I'm glad to not have thought of in years.

If the MS hate does not exist any more, explain why Nokia phone sales collapsed after they announced their MS alliance.

Is that really MS hate or just a lack of confidence in a Nokia/MS alliance being a good thing?

I cant speak for too many, but among my community of Linux users, Nokia has turned from Linux champion to piece of turd overnight.

It wasnt too long ago when I was a hardcore Nokia fanboy that forced my whole family to use Nokia-only, eagerly waiting for the next Meego phone, despite the lack of apps and user community.

Nokia was Symbian, it was the enterprise Symbian devices in Europe contributing to their marketshare. The future of lowend could have been Meltemi, but the hardware would have been made in China and sold by Nokia, Meego is gone (last people pushed into their own company, per the planets today), Nokia (with their Microsoft transplant CEO) announced an EOL for Symbian and marketshare dried up.

You're comparing apples with oranges. MySQL Enterprise Monitor would've automatically noticed the missing index and asked you if it's ok to add.