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Comment by supernovae | Hacker News Reader

That's funny, I see it differently. Windows 2012 is finally coming of age with R2, HyperV is starting to shine competitively, PowerShell is kicking ass and taking names - Desired State Config FTW, Visual Studio is finally getting better C++ support, Windows 8 has HyperV built in, much better performance overall. Exchange has improved leaps and bounds when deployed correctly (hardware load balancer instead of its crappy mac address cloning hack) so on and so forth. The fact you essentially got 1m of free software and support over the what, 3-4 years in the program should have allowed you to better leverage your known expenses and plan accordingly. Also, Microsoft isn't nearly this evil unless you're doing something wrong, just license datacenter copies or hell, move to Azure and save even more money.

Quite frankly, i'm calling BS.

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Rubbish.

HyperV is years too late. We've had VMware since 1998 and Xen, KVM etc for years as well.

PowerShell - Shit crock from end to end. It's a rotten mess of an over-complicated, inconsistent environment that barely works and performs abysmally at the best of times. They can't even get the story straight on dates. Half of it is UTC and half local time and when you mix, boom!

Desired State Config - We had this 20 years ago on Sun machines, plus it doesn't work very well and is not holistic.

VS2012 - Yeah a little better but still crashes 5 times a day with HRESULT errors and throws your workflow out of the window.

Exchange - "when deployed correctly". Enough said.

What! We get fuck all support. 30 support credits a year which we use up in a month and have to wait 6 months plus for a solution in most cases!

Have you ever tried to decipher microsoft licensing? Probably not - it's a rats nest that means you're always guilty of something.

We can't move to Azure - we have financial, insurance and healthcare clients. None of them want Azure.

I think you're looking through some rose-tinted glasses there.

Intrigued by your statement I googled about and haven't been able to find any articles that cast doubt on Azure's suitability for financial, insurance or healthcare. Nor any articles that claim poor attitude of these industries towards azure in general. Actually, most of what I have encountered - are fairly enthusiastic articles, case studies and white papers claiming just the opposite. Would you care to provide some information to substantiate your claims? Thanks.

License compliance with Microsoft software is a lot of trouble and risk, and it, more than the paper cost, is often the worst thing about using Microsoft stuff.

"Simple" scenarios like maintaining a warm replicated data center becomes a ridiculous exercise of license guessing, where every Microsoft rep tells you something different. Licensing newer instances of Sharepoint is simply a riot.

I'm not saying there aren't advantages, but it's nice as platform and system architects to plan out hardware and software and be done with it, and not get distracted for months discussing exactly which stack of licenses you need from Microsoft.

Or you could just ignore it and hope they don't come knocking. BizSpark is actually a great example where Microsoft encourages that -- the graduation benefits are in many ways incredibly vague (not to mention that the program duration and benefits are changing constantly). Right now when you graduate you get-

up to 4 Windows Servers (Standard Edition) and 2 SQL Servers (Standard Edition)

What does that mean? Per user/device copies of SQL Server, because that would be completely useless to any company serving the internet in any way. Two core copies, because again that's laughably anemic. What does it mean?

Yet almost no one actually talks about what it means because who cares, right? Until the day that the BSA comes knocking because a disgruntled former employee left a tip.

Totally agree. The licensing is ridiculously opaque and complex.

As a simple example: If I understand correctly, BizSpark lets you install a couple of copies of Office and use it for regular word processing tasks within your startup. However, you cannot install the BizSpark Windows 8 desktop license -- those are only for testing and development. I think. There's no indication of any restrictions on the license key download page.

THIS! This is one of the two largest arguments in favor of OSS. With a PG server all I have to do is throw it up, and not worry about the licensing. That's extra time back in my day for real work. No stress, no fuss, no muss.

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