Comment by ManBlanket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ManBlanket | Hacker News Reader

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The comparison of cloud platforms truly is heavily distorted at a startup. Most companies aren't comparing AWS and MS in a vacuum when presented with the decision. How much of the world's software runs on dotnet? Windows, Office, and Active Directory command their own predominant shares, not to mention other tools like CRM. MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Suppose the CTO for an insurance claims company is presented with the decision of migrating a legacy platform which already runs on a fat stack of MS products. They don't even need a salesperson to convince them Azure is the obvious first choice, because to them it's just another cannon on the battleship.

In my experience the tribal evangelism for AWS is... intense... and they've somehow convinced people to proselytize unpaid on their behalf. Having worked with both I'll occasionally mention Azure if only to revel at the spicy takes. Honestly though, I worked at that claims company I mentioned. Likewise the startup I work at today threw their hats in with AWS. Both were respectively good decisions, both bad in their own right. As ever, try to do everything and something is going to give.

> MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc.

Microsoft earned thst reputation with a lot of development and organizational practices that they've since abandoned. It may take people a while to notice, but today's Microsoft is not prioritizing stable software interfaces and backwards compatability.

It took a lot of testing to ensure existing software and hardware continued to work with new operating systems, and they're not doing as much testing anymore.

Microsoft had some of the best documentation in the world. People really don't understand how valuable that is, and how important. Microsoft in 2020 certainly doesn't understand. They produce vast reams of auto-generated "documentation" where the only text is the function names with spaces added between the words.

Reminds me of PowerShell. There's extensive, detailed and super-useful documentation for pretty much all the commandlets available... but it's not installed by default. Get-Help ... will happily tell you that you need to download help if you want to see any details beyond command signature. Who in their right mind though this is a good idea? Such documentation should be shipped with the default install.

I have it on the top of my mind because it bit me twice in recent month. I had to do some PS work on some VMs that didn't have Internet access (beyond RDP). Sure, I can Alt+Tab to a browser on my machine, but at this point, why even have Get-Help? Contrast that with Emacs experience, where everything is documented, and documentation is easily accessible, off-line, and by default.

> I'll occasionally mention Azure if only to revel at the spicy takes.

Well there are a lot of old school Microsoft haters. I used to know a bunch of Unix guys ~ten years ago whose unstated principle was that anything Microsoft did was unilaterally a bad idea (and everything Unix ever did was always the best possible way).

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