Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory.
If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
These are the kind of release notes you'd expect to see for a dying product on life support, used only by those few remaining customers that are too big and too invested in it to migrate away.
Also, the Server 2025 release is the first one to change anything in Active Directory, the 2022 and 2019 versions had essentially nothing in the release notes for AD.
A few performance tweaks and a long-overdue security catch-up or two in a decade is not a vibrant, living and breathing product. It's a shambling zombie.