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Don't know if I agree with your first point. AWS got a head start, but Azure is gaining and fast (Azure revenue - not profit - is at least 30+% of AWS already). That says nothing about SkyDrive either, which is already the biggest cloud syncing service out there. So saying Microsoft is getting "crushed" in the cloud is _far_ from being true.

Right, from the revenue report: "Commercial cloud revenue grew 103%". This appears to be the largest section of growth reported, so it looks like Microsoft is doing pretty well in the cloud space.

Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/

Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.

Usually, but not in this case.

Something about this sounded sketchy...

http://www.liveside.net/2013/05/06/skydrive-reaches-250-mill...

places Sky Drive in fourth, behind Dropbox, Google Drive, and ICloud....

From your source, "According to OPSWAT’s data (which admittedly could be wildly skewed depending on who actually downloads their software, take it with multiple grains of salt)."

Admittedly I'm referencing data I read somewhere which I can't find right now, so I'll retract the statement about SkyDrive being the biggest. It is certainly up there though and growing according to this financial report.

Almost every windows tablet sold is another user for SkyDrive. I am not sure about Windows 8 and 8.1, but significant portion of those sales will add users to SkyDrive as well. Let's not even talk about Office 365 which forces you to use SkyDrive. So while SkyDrive might not be #1 in terms of number of users, given aggressive bundling strategy, I would expect it to be close to the top in terms of growth.

But as a metric for actual popularity, that is a completely useless stat. Microsoft also used to crow about how many tens of millions of people had Windows Media Center, but most of them were just people who bought a "premium" version of windows with their pc and didn't even know what Windows Media Center was. If gazillions of people are technically users of skydrive simply by virtue of having windows, that really says nothing about skydrive's actual popularity. It's like claiming solitaire is the world's top-selling game.

> If gazillions of people are technically users of skydrive simply by virtue of having windows

Or Hotmail. I don't use Windows, but I use Hotmail and I have some files stashed away on Skydrive. This is stuff I don't access frequently where it's fine to go through the browser to get them.

I even tried it on a Mac, but it needs a case-insensitive filesystem. Amateurs...

I think Azure is great, but it remains that people are using linux for their servers.

Azure is OS agnostic; Linux runs great on it.

Hence why I said it was so great. My point was that windows is dying as a server OS, though I'm sure enterprise will keep it kicking for several decades

Microsoft even charges less for Linux VMs on Azure than Windows Server VMs with the same specs.

Exactly! Windows is a dying beast.

SkyDrive is bigger than Dropbox? Is it bundled with Windows/part of the install then?

With Windows 8, and has been part of the windows phone ecosystem for ages.

But it's more than that, SkyDrive was launched in 2007, DropBox 2008. In classic Microsoft style, they didn't really tell anyone it existed for a few years.

I'll be honest, I don't 'get' dropbox. Their security record means I'll never, ever trust them with anything beyond a lolcat, they don't really have any killer features.

The fact that on Windows SkyDrive offers much better user experience than DropBox, the implementation of JIT-downloading files, the fact it hasn't messed around with ASLR in my web browser.

I gather dropbox is better if you run OSX, but at the end of the day having 1% of windows market is better than 10% of OSX market.

A big use of dropbox is sharing files with other people.. so unless all your friends run windows as well, cross platform is actually a big deal.

I'm sharing some vacations photos with Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone and Linux users.

All of which can be done on SkyDrive. Not sure why the downvote for this.

The only one lacking a first party client is Linux. There are 3rd party ones serving it.

For simple sharing, it can be done entirely in a web browser. In fact for photo sharing SkyDrives web-based offering is much better than dropbox, from handling of exif/geotags to the whole commenting and such.

GNOME can integrated with SkyDrive since June 2012.

Oh, ok. It was your last lines that made me think of cross-platform availability and sharing. Let's say SkyDrive had 100% of the windows users but only 10% of the Mac users. It would not be especially useful to me since one of the two big usecases is to share many files with others as easily as possible.

Which actually (and thankfully!) I think is the problem with DropBox's business model.

Most apps I use, will happily use SkyDrive, DropBox or Google Drive. As a business, why would you ever tie yourself to the fait of one. The 'key risk' is simply to great to be tied entirely to one vendor or platform. It is one of the best arguments for making AppStore Apps multi-platform.

Which brings me back to my original point. SkyDrive has some better features, even if you only use OSX. Both Google Drive and Sky Drive are working on converging the web-app space. When people are just in a browser the word / excel / ppt / etc document editing ability (all free) is considerably better than google docs.

For sharing simple photo album, its much better, especially if you want to share with someone who can edit. It also blurs into almost facebook territory with the comment system too, but has better privacy.

I can't think of one feature in fact that would make think Hmm DropBox is the best for this. As I don't have a mac to compare, combined with my deep loathing of the UX/Design Language of OSX, I have only glanced over the feature sheet. Can't see anything SkyDrive is missing on OSX that dropbox offers.

Ah, thanks for the info. I tend to use Drive myself - I just assumed Dropbox was the most used/largest.

> NT server for a small business running exchange and maybe Access is shifting over to gmail + AWS

I think many small businesses are looking at Microsoft's cloud exchange solution to be honest. Works just like exchange (meaning all the mobile devices and apps that expect exchange like outlook still work), isn't expensive, pretty reliable and gives loads of space.

> Sure there is Azure, and you can ask many VPS providers to put Windows into the box, but Linux system images dominate the 'cloud' OS space by a large margin.

That depends if you're talking about the host OS or the guests. There are plenty of people running Ubuntu instances on Azure.

One thing I keep hearing is how great MS offerings are for businesses and enterprises. What offerings are these? How do they beat the open source systems?

Try this, what is the open source competitor to Active Directory from the point of view on a system admin who manages 1,000s of PCs? This is just one part of the equation, but it shows a lot about the difference between Microsoft and open source projects.

1,000s of PCs... So you work in a small Enterprise shop?

... I wasn't describing my situation, although I would bet 1,000s is a bit more common than 10k and 100k but I take your point (I think).

I use FreeBSD with Samba, but I only have 500 at my current site with a mix of iPads, PCs, and OS X.

It's LDAP. I'm not looking for "points", but I'm looking for a broad understanding of why an enterprise would definitely select Microsoft. From a techie in the trenches with an eye on founding his own company, I simply can not grasp why I would use Microsoft or other proprietary technology at this point.

What LDAP implementation would you use?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/663402/what-are-the-diffe...

OpenLDAP. But I don't want to derail into nits really - I'm looking at the broader question of "What offerings conclusively swing an enterprise away from Linux".

"...swing an enterprise away from..." implies they are already there. They are not. The question should be reversed,"What offerings conclusively swing an enterprise away from Windows?", and the answer is not much (so far).

LDAP is not a substitute for the whole of Active Directory it is a small piece.

That's the problem your a techie and if your founding a techie company non-MS solutions will work. But if your running a business that's not techinical think insurance agency, mortgage company, etc. You would go down to "best buy" buy a couple of windows boxes run your loan officer product on windows and try not to think about technology again. Where I work we have a product that runs java on the server but requires IE as the browser. 5 prod websphere servers 700 windows boxes for the users. On the development boxes we run tomcat but if there's a production issues they want to be able to call microsoft or IBM.Also, your going to train 700 users to use linux on the desktop. Besides can you lease linuxs boxes from Dell?

Currently there are a broad set of tools to manage thousands of PCs from a core infrastructure, think Puppet or Chef for Windows Desktops. And you can set broad policies about software and access.

That sort of deployment, where you have say a call center with 1,500 people sitting in front of a PC to look up orders and such on their desk. You can update all of them, make sure none of them can surf outside to random web sites, etc.

It is also useful in a large technology enterprise where you have many developers. (Say a large C# shop of contract coders) because the tools help manage workstation build environments etc. When you are a mixed shop it is less useful.

Basically if all of your IT needs can be met by Microsoft products, they have a good story about how you can deploy them, manage them, and maintain them. There isn't a solid open source equivalent. Part of Google's strategy there is 'Chromebook' since if you're running a bunch of terminals that makes things easier to centrally manage.

If you were going to build something in the FOSS space here it would probably impose some strong limits on customizations in order to work. It would also need a way of disabling 'smart' employees from subverting the system (remember the kids who broke through the restrictions in their school issued ipads?) You have to think in the mindset that your employees are not your friends and may be trying to subvert the system :-) The "ideal" (and I put it in scare quotes because most employees hate it) is a workstation that can only run the tools to do your job, and only browse to sites that help you do your job.

I expect we'll get back to that and there will be a 'soft' network for personal devices which is monitored.

Hum. I guess you're right; thinking of people I hired as people I don't trust does change the mindset a lot. I would hate to work for a place like that, and would feel awful about helping build that kind of place. Probably very "hacker" of me. :)

Of course, technically, I can conceptualize that in my own company, I would set up a stock Puppet-based configuration that controlled Debian workstations, build computers, etc. Firewall rules, access rules, login rights, etc - all via puppet.

It does go a bit deeper than not trusting folks[1]. Sometimes you must make sure you comply with information sharing laws in your field (e.g. HIPA). Two, most people are not super computer literate and just want the damn thing to work. Having a standard config that you slap down with their data stored on good servers is actually a pretty helpful thing to them. They don't want control of their machine, they want stability, reliability, and recovery from mistakes. The accountant wants to do his/her job and not learn IT's job.

As much as I'm not a fan of Windows Servers, I understand that they provide a pretty easy, integrated approach. I do wish open source projects would look to that and not think what's available is good enough. People will trade up their Camry for a Lexus, but not willing trade down to a Yaris.

1) although with over 1,000 or 10,000 employees you probably should assume you've hired some damn fools or evil folks - that's just basic numbers

Active Directory and it's deep integration into all MS Products is a killer feature in my opinion. Federated Identity Management, and ADFS are tightly integrated into AD but at the same time open and make Access Management and integration with other Enterprises pretty seamless.

I think a lot of people outside the corporate world have a hard time understanding the virtues of Microsoft because they work on such a small scale or without Security, Compliance, and Regulation concerns that are requisite in Enterprise Environments.

Having worked in a very secure/compliant/regulated shop, I can understand those concerns (I was not a sysadmin, I was a developerish person).

I'm going to presume from your answer that OpenLDAP is not sufficient then? Certainly Linux systems can use LDAP.

AD looks more like the addition of puppy, a yellow pages solution, and a mail settings wizard. I'm sure there are other features too, but I don't see people using them. Linux has nothing like that. In part that's because:

- It's far from consensus that a puppy-like system is the best way to manage the settings of all your computers, including desktops. Linux has plenty of other tools for managing multiple computers, and almost nobody uses only one.

- Really, what was MS thinking when they joined email configuration with the desktop settings management? (And ntp, dhcp, and etc?) AD imposes a lot of restriction on how one must organize his services, and just a tiny minority would be content with something like that on Linux.

- There are plenty of yellow pages solutions that people like more than LDAP.

> what was MS thinking when they joined email configuration with the desktop settings management?

Selling Exchange licences, what else?

> AD imposes a lot of restriction on how one must organize his services

Preventing machine-profile creep is a big concern for me. Every different kind of machine we deploy is one more different configuration we need to manage.

> Certainly Linux systems can use LDAP.

I think the operative word here is "can." Active Directory allows you to actively reject machines from your network that are not part of the Domain and it can prevent you from extricating a machine from the Domain to circumvent restrictions imposed upon the machine, the user, the location, or any other myriad of configurable factors.

It would surprise me if there was something you couldn't do to on a nix machine that you could do with Active Directory on a Windows based PC but the time and maintenance involved are in no way proportional. The full featured and easy to use tool-chain was what made Microsoft great, and they lost that with overly complicated systems in the 2000s but they seem to be getting back on the right path with Powershell and their Core Server administration tools.

Additionally Active Directory is an LDAP provider so it's relatively easy to integrate nix machines into an AD environment.

Thanks! I appreciate your insights here.

And what about the massive enterprises running exchange?