Hacker News Reader

Comment by eapotapov | Hacker News Reader

This seems to me as some kind of defeat and that makes me sad. It's sad for me to look how great companies grew old

I think Microsoft is now afraid that people (developers that were hired by enterprises) are willing to move to *nix so much so that they will force enterprises to gave up on MS stack.

This way they could lose SQL Server customer and Windows customer at the same time - having SQL Server version for Linux will keep SQL Server customer.

I believe this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago, and moreover, it would have sounded just unbelievable.

This reminds me not only of things that could change very fast. It reminds that even when things go well with your business there's always someone thing that could "disrupt" your market, like a new dimension. And that thing won't be invisible. It will grow nearby and you will see such company and just won't assume that it represents any danger.

View on HN

It is not sad, it is Microsoft playing the right moves to stay relevant, instead of joining Sun, DEC, Wang and many others that were once upon something great.

Look at SGI and Cray, they also had to re-invent themselves around their own distributions of GNU/Linux and tailored made hardware, instead of keep selling their own UNIX variants.

If I have to develop on UNIX-like OSes, but can still enjoy all the nice Microsoft tooling I have grew to love, then great.

Love or hate it, FOSS around UNIX has commoditized the OSes.

Who knows if now we will ever move away from a UNIX monoculture on the enterprise, specially with the increasing Linux / OS X love from Microsoft side.

> This seems to me as some kind of defeat and that makes me sad. It's sad for me to look how great companies grew old

Your sadness is misplaced.

Presumably you like resilience, yes? How does one achieve resiliency? At least in part via redundancy. A homogeneous environment, which an environment which relies on one vendor is, is non-redundant. All you've got then is a single point of lock-in, that can never be a good idea. You can be held hostage to the whims of the vendor. As soon as Linux became a viable choice to Windows and old Unix people left in their droves, and for this very reason.

To my mind, Microsoft is now acting like a more mature rational hungry company. I thought I'd never see the day. And frankly, if they hadn't started changing they'd be on the road to complete irrelevance.

> This way they could lose SQL Server customer and Windows customer at the same time

False. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845783 Staying with SQL Server because Linux version was provided.

> I believe this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago, and moreover, it would have sounded just unbelievable.

Agreed. But that was not a good thing, that was very bad. For Microsoft, and their customers. Now that may have been something to lament.

You've made some big leaps if you think this is sad.

The world is (always) changing. Success comes from constant evolution.

For Microsoft, this is continued victory, not defeat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com