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Comment by PaulWaldman | Hacker News Reader

Progress has an interesting angle of providing a suite of developer tools with their products crossing the categories of both design-time and run-time. There doesn't seem to be too much focus at this point though, in comparison to JetBrains for example. I'd imagine more acquisitions are coming.

They have the Telerik suite of tools, which is used by .Net developers, but how many .Net developers use Chef?

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Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone in the windows / .NET world that is using chef, or have used it and stuck with it. Most people on that platform seem to gravitate to Chocolatey. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any using Chef primarily but it’s pretty rare it seems.

Agreed. Which is why I find it odd that their products are in a mismatch of verticals. This strategy only makes sense if more acquisitions are on the way.

Perhaps they are looking at Habitat which is a cross-platform package manager that competes with Chocolatey somewhat.

Chocolatey and Chef aren't rivalrous. When I've managed Windows/Linux mixed environments before, I did use Chef, and I used Chef to install Chocolatey packages.

Chef isn't just CM, it's also a lot of policy enforcement tooling these days. I don't have much use for it anymore but it does have its niche.

Chocolatey is a proxy-package manager, automates fetching packages off the Internet installing them (often through the packages own .msi or other installer). So it doesn't compete against Chef any more than yum or apt-get or Homebrew competes with Chef. Chef supports Chocolatey directly.

That being said, the experience on Windows is abysmal. The implementation with ruby on Windows is sloooooooow. You wait seconds just to get things like version.

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