Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.
I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.
They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.
Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!
Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)
I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.
You are aware that the "World Domination" being referred to was talk of Linux's World Domination, right? So you're not disagreeing, you're supporting the observation that Linux eventually dethroned the 800 lb gorilla and that the 800 lb gorilla is a shadow of what it once was.
For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this back into the 1990s.
IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."
Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?
Yeah, it's so surprising that Microsoft didn't implement the "Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface" (which was just for web browses) or other interfaces that weren't build for Windows.
I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history.
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
MS used to really trash open source, with Ballmer calling GPL "cancer". (Although the company pulled back from that extreme).
When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it.
But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and possibly other stuff. The EULA used to refer to the regents of Berkley.)
Don't forget Halloween Memo X, along with as I remember stuff from GrokLaw, which revealed that Microsoft funneled 86 million to SCO when it was litigating SCO v. The Open Source World.
(Especially bogus because SCO knew in advance they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM), but I doubt Microsoft knew that.)
They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.
Yes, Linux has dominated the commodity server space. Look what happened to Sun & Solaris. But what about the desktop? Back in the late 90s there was much talk of how the Linux desktop would take over, KDE vs Gnome etc. IBM and Sun backed Open Office, Andy Herzfeld launched Nautilus. And then it didn't happen. MS still owns the business desktop with Windows & Office. And MS still has a big chunk of the consumer desktop, though Apple has taken a lot of it with MacOS.
People focused on innovating too quickly without building enough stability. Plus, programmers started imagining they could innovate as designers and we have Gnome 3, Unity, etc. All built for a mythical herd of grandmas who run linux, but need it to be user-friendly, in some imagined user-friendly way.
Yes for sure but the desktop itself is not the end of the game anymore, yes Microsoft still owns the desktop but on mobile and tablets, it's another story.
The desktop market is still mostly Windows & MacOS, but if we instead look at client devices in general, Microsoft is losing quite badly: Android (running a Linux kernel) and iOS (BSD-derived, like MacOS) have almost all of the market share, with Windows struggling to make much of a dent.
People forget that MS used to have it's own Unix in the 80s: Xenix. I ported a large DEC PDP Fortran codebase to run on Xenix back then - it was far too big to fit in the 640K DOS limit. Writing the Xenix device driver for the 68000 powered graphics card in the PC was fun.
It's also very likely that if things went just a little differently, Microsoft's main OS today would probably be Xenix-based.
Microsoft created Xenix because they knew DOS would have a limited future, and in particular they knew there was a lot of value in running enterprise software on microcomputers. They also knew costs would go down and performance would go up over time and that running minicomputer-grade stuff on micros would become more and more feasible as time goes on.
They made Xenix for a number of microcomputer platforms, typically partnering with the hardware manufacturers (as is the case with Tandy). For the PC, they chose to partner with SCO instead for some reason.
Xenix was Microsoft's next-generation operating system, intended to be a platform for the few high-end customers who wanted to run enterprise software on PC, with plans to push it across the mid-range and even the low end as PCs get faster and fast hardware gets cheaper.
And then, it all changed when AT&T got broken up. Suddenly, AT&T was allowed to commercialize their software, including Unix. And AT&T was very, very much interested in doing this. The whole thing culminated in System V Release 4, but that took a few years for AT&T to put it together. In the meantime, Microsoft thought they'd never be able to compete in the Unix market against the creators of Unix, so they panicked, sold Xenix to SCO, and began looking for a partner for their _new_ next-generation operating system.
So Microsoft hooked up with IBM and created OS/2 as their successor to Xenix. Eventually, however, Microsoft fell out with IBM...
After falling out with IBM, Microsoft decided to do it entirely by themselves, so they poached a bunch of ex-VMS guys from DEC and created Windows NT. After a few years serving as an enterprise OS, Microsoft began trickling NT down to the consumer market, eventually replacing DOS-based Windows entirely with the launch of Windows XP in 2001.
Just imagine the alternate world where Microsoft didn't get spooked by AT&T commercializing Unix and instead focused on Xenix, trickled it down to the consumer market, and ultimately replaced DOS-based Windows with a Windows-style GUI built on top of Xenix.
IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy for a long while (one reason Compaq was the first to come out a 386), and demanded OS/2 run on it.
Unfortunately, the 286 was seriously crippled for doing this sort of thing, as I recall, switching segment registers was very expensive. And for those of you who didn't live through the ugliness of 8086->286 (and 386 and beyond compatibility modes) programming, these were thoroughly 16 bit computers, where you had at most 64 KiB segments each of stack, code and data, unless you switched one of those segment registers to point elsewhere. That was cheap enough for the vast gain in memory on the 8086/8, and the 286 in its compatibility mode, but native? That mode did a lot more for you (like, hey, memory protection!), and Intel when that decision was made and implemented slowly simply didn't understand how people used their CPUs.
Anyway, Windows 3.0 and on was taking off, no one but stupidly managed Lotus wanted to program OS/2 Presentation Manager, and prior to in 1988 that DEC killed off a RISC CPU + new operating system effort in favor of continuing with VAX/VMS for a while longer. The software people, at least, were in Bellevue, WA, and many were hired to develop OS/2 3.0, which due to the above morphed into NT 3.1 (which really was around a 3.x Microsoft quality release :-).
(Seriously, it's a vile, vile hack, involving dynamically patching running binaries to work round Windows ABI differences and work around seg faults. But it works well enough to run a Debian userland.)
Microsoft are now moving quickly to allow users to run .NET on all platforms. How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in?
Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?
I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Server.
Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
An even simpler summary: To add SPDY or HTTP/2 support to IIS, you must upgrade the operating system. I understand why this is (http.sys) but ... wow. Whereas using nginx I literally add "spdy" to the config and presto, double-digit% improvement on my site.
> Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
This seems to be one of the patterns for large enterprise software companies, IBM did it as well.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft could do with Linux on the desktop if they swung their weight behind it, Microsoft has incredible engineering resources and some amazing programmers, I doubt it would happen but it would be fascinating.
Wow, I'm currently making nearly the exact same switch, albeit on a smaller scale. I'm currently in charge of a lot of old ASP.NET applications but for the new flagship thing we're looking at ASP.NET 5 on Linux on Azure (BizSpark), Go where it makes sense performance-wise or problem-wise and possibly Postgres instead of SQL Server, although I'm not sure on that last bit yet.
The plan for the original Active Directory was to be the directory service of a Microsoft dominated "information highway" called "The Microsoft Network" (v1). see the infamous Microsoft memo from Bill Gates
It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
You're right in that Windows is complex operating system but how is it any different than CentOS? Sure, Powershell/DSC does make life easier but how are these utilities necessarily any worse or better than a combination of bash, python, kickstart?
Exchange Onsite deployments aren't dead, on-site email is dead. Unless, you're "too big" for the cloud (>20k users) because of <$Requirement> then Exchange is an option.
Keeping data On-Premise has always been a challenge, SAN are expensive but that's what it takes if you want data locally.
I can't comment on the rest but we're comparing Apples to Oranges here.
If you are struggling/fighting with the large deployments, I recommend you have a chat with http://www.devopsguys.com/ down in Cardiff, UK. That's all they do (and well). Speak to Jim and tell them @Junto sent you.
"How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in ?"
Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
I think it's treated as a necessary evil. People are starting to realise that it's less necessary these days.
Anecdotally, back a decade ago it was common to see a Windows 2000/2003/SBS box in even an SME environment being a fileserver/exchange/intranet/AD box. Now, I rarely see one. In fact they're declining even in large corps.
I'm currently in my first nix job after years with Windows. It's a larger company (15k+ people) and using RedHat for it's linux solution (solaris/aix is also present). Honestly, I don't understand the $$$ argument at the enterprise level against msoft. Not only are you paying Redhat for support but their RPMs are about a year behind what's out there (that's a lot of time!). I'm trying to get .net (coreclr) compiled now on RHEL to play around but having a heck of a time b/c of all the old packages (btw- if anyone has instructions for this, __PLEASE__ send along).
If you're comparing Red Hat RPM's version numbers, then don't. Red Hat works by backporting features and fixes on top of the old versions, precisely so customers don't need to upgrade to new major versions so often.
Lot's of Shops use Ubuntu, yes. However you could also use CentOS or Fedora to be more flexible then with RedHat, especially when it comes to costs.
'Mostly' you don't need the Enterprise support, however without any paying for it we won't have Fedora / CentOS in the future. ;)
As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS.
There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
When I first saw a whole stack of low latency C++ Win32 based servers running on Windows supporting an interest rate trading business back in 2004 I was amazed. Talarian SmartSockets was used for interprocess pub/sub between servers. There was no COM. No thread pools, just a handful of threads in each process executing distinct code. Very clean async design. Back then Linux didn't have lightweight threads, IIRC. I think this is the kind of thing Windows Nano might support. Is that what you had in mind when you look forward to Windows as a server OS?
"C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C?
"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?
I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.
This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?
This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
imho, if Active Directory/ADAM ran on Linux demand for Windows Server would drop considerably. However Windows Server is also used to deliver Citrix-style remote desktops (using App Virtualization[1]) and that would be harder to replace. Also, SQL Server and Exchange use plenty of Windows-specific OS features -- it wouldn't be impossible to port to Linux but it would be a lot of work.
Actually Active Directory already ran on Linux. Samba4 has support for AD up to 2008 R2. Currently I don't think ADAM is builtin yet, but SAMBA4 is already in a good state, however it still misses a good GUI, (you need a MS OS to configure some stuff, like GPO)
Microsoft's foray - I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way - into OS technologies doesn't surprise me any more.
I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:
> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.
The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.
Sooner or later Microsoft will just build his GUI on Top of Linux and sell that or sell the support like Redhat. That would mean a lot to the computing World.
When .NET runs on more Devices they could just port more and more compatibility.
Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....
Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."
To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.
It is a question of switch control more than anything. They are losing Cisco software, etc... with cheaper Open Compute switches, so they need some means to configure them within Azure; in all respects, that's a benefit to Microsoft. Facebook did the same thing: https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope...
Yes, the ASIC vendors provide drivers for Linux but not for Windows. MSR ported the Broadcom driver to Windows in the past, but it looks like Azure decided to take the path of least resistance.
Interix. Microsoft's Unix. It runs on the NT kernel alongside win32 as another process personality. Most windowses come with the Interix core, and you can get the userland part from Microsoft --- it's called Services For Unix these days, I think. It even comes with GCC. It's a pretty nice piece of work, behaving just like an old school Unix.
But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
I'm not familiar with Mono or any of the .Net on Linux efforts, so forgive my ignorance. However, having a running .Net stack with a CLR VM and class libs is not the whole story when it comes to running Windows native server side stuff. One of the things I've discovered building spreadserve.com is that there's a lot of COM & Registry plumbing necessary to enable Windows native desktop binaries to run in a server environment. So I imagine running real .Net based servers on Linux would require something like Wine to supply ABI compatible interfaces to the registry and COM services, and lots else beside. That's a non trivial undertaking. The MS Linux described in the Register story sounds like it's dedicated to networking tasks. I'd bet there's no .Net running on it at all.
Readit News
They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.
Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!
Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)
You are aware that the "World Domination" being referred to was talk of Linux's World Domination, right? So you're not disagreeing, you're supporting the observation that Linux eventually dethroned the 800 lb gorilla and that the 800 lb gorilla is a shadow of what it once was.
IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."
Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?
Deleted Comment
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it.
But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and possibly other stuff. The EULA used to refer to the regents of Berkley.)
http://betanews.com/2001/06/18/microsoft-we-use-freebsd/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182249
(Especially bogus because SCO knew in advance they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM), but I doubt Microsoft knew that.)
I'll bet that by itself had consequences.
Microsoft created Xenix because they knew DOS would have a limited future, and in particular they knew there was a lot of value in running enterprise software on microcomputers. They also knew costs would go down and performance would go up over time and that running minicomputer-grade stuff on micros would become more and more feasible as time goes on.
They made Xenix for a number of microcomputer platforms, typically partnering with the hardware manufacturers (as is the case with Tandy). For the PC, they chose to partner with SCO instead for some reason.
Xenix was Microsoft's next-generation operating system, intended to be a platform for the few high-end customers who wanted to run enterprise software on PC, with plans to push it across the mid-range and even the low end as PCs get faster and fast hardware gets cheaper.
And then, it all changed when AT&T got broken up. Suddenly, AT&T was allowed to commercialize their software, including Unix. And AT&T was very, very much interested in doing this. The whole thing culminated in System V Release 4, but that took a few years for AT&T to put it together. In the meantime, Microsoft thought they'd never be able to compete in the Unix market against the creators of Unix, so they panicked, sold Xenix to SCO, and began looking for a partner for their _new_ next-generation operating system.
So Microsoft hooked up with IBM and created OS/2 as their successor to Xenix. Eventually, however, Microsoft fell out with IBM...
After falling out with IBM, Microsoft decided to do it entirely by themselves, so they poached a bunch of ex-VMS guys from DEC and created Windows NT. After a few years serving as an enterprise OS, Microsoft began trickling NT down to the consumer market, eventually replacing DOS-based Windows entirely with the launch of Windows XP in 2001.
Just imagine the alternate world where Microsoft didn't get spooked by AT&T commercializing Unix and instead focused on Xenix, trickled it down to the consumer market, and ultimately replaced DOS-based Windows with a Windows-style GUI built on top of Xenix.
IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy for a long while (one reason Compaq was the first to come out a 386), and demanded OS/2 run on it.
Unfortunately, the 286 was seriously crippled for doing this sort of thing, as I recall, switching segment registers was very expensive. And for those of you who didn't live through the ugliness of 8086->286 (and 386 and beyond compatibility modes) programming, these were thoroughly 16 bit computers, where you had at most 64 KiB segments each of stack, code and data, unless you switched one of those segment registers to point elsewhere. That was cheap enough for the vast gain in memory on the 8086/8, and the 286 in its compatibility mode, but native? That mode did a lot more for you (like, hey, memory protection!), and Intel when that decision was made and implemented slowly simply didn't understand how people used their CPUs.
Anyway, Windows 3.0 and on was taking off, no one but stupidly managed Lotus wanted to program OS/2 Presentation Manager, and prior to in 1988 that DEC killed off a RISC CPU + new operating system effort in favor of continuing with VAX/VMS for a while longer. The software people, at least, were in Bellevue, WA, and many were hired to develop OS/2 3.0, which due to the above morphed into NT 3.1 (which really was around a 3.x Microsoft quality release :-).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
http://lbw.sourceforge.net
(Seriously, it's a vile, vile hack, involving dynamically patching running binaries to work round Windows ABI differences and work around seg faults. But it works well enough to run a Debian userland.)
Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?
I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Server.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
This seems to be one of the patterns for large enterprise software companies, IBM did it as well.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft could do with Linux on the desktop if they swung their weight behind it, Microsoft has incredible engineering resources and some amazing programmers, I doubt it would happen but it would be fascinating.
It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
Exchange Onsite deployments aren't dead, on-site email is dead. Unless, you're "too big" for the cloud (>20k users) because of <$Requirement> then Exchange is an option.
Keeping data On-Premise has always been a challenge, SAN are expensive but that's what it takes if you want data locally.
I can't comment on the rest but we're comparing Apples to Oranges here.
Doesn't really sound you know what you're talking about. That technology is dead and doesn't really replace BizTalk.
"In April 2015 Microsoft announced that it will end support for AppFabric for Windows Server on the 2nd April 2016."
Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
Anecdotally, back a decade ago it was common to see a Windows 2000/2003/SBS box in even an SME environment being a fileserver/exchange/intranet/AD box. Now, I rarely see one. In fact they're declining even in large corps.
Are other
nix shops using Ubuntu for their servers?There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?
I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.
This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?
This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
I must ask, what exactly makes the current NT kernel a 'hybrid' kernel ?
[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh397409.aspx
[1]: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...
I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:
> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.
The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.
Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....
Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."
To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.
There's no denying the NT kernel is an excellent piece of engineering.
But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
Wikipedia says that "Interix will not be included in Windows versions after Windows 8" though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix
As for .Net, ASP.Net 5 runs fine on Linux and OSX without any COM or registry dependencies. It is entirely platform portable and open source.