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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

Unironically: the fact that Microsoft has spent millions of man-hours building a complete alternative server ecosystem to UNIX/Linux continually blows my mind. Web servers, containers, virtualization, databases, languages, automation, security, etc. It's like NIH maximalism.

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Conversely, from the perspective of people that started with computers in the 1990s, it's bizarre how Linux keeps failing to copy Windows. At one point something like 95% of PCs were Windows, and the rest were mostly Apple Macs. Similarly in the server space, you would be surprised to hear that the majority of servers were Windows for quite a while. Note that I didn't say web servers, because not all the world is HTTP.

There is still no equivalent to Microsoft Exchange, Group Policy, Enterprise PKI, and a bunch of other things in the Linux world. SAMBA copies Active Directory, but it's a direct clone, not a unique product.

Not to mention that SQL Server isn't somehow "copying" UNIX. Its performance and feature set blows most of the open-source databases out of the water, with only Postgres having superior features (but not performance).

Microsoft essentially invented OLAP with SQL Analysis Services, and they still have the most popular products in that space, such as Power BI.

Etc...

>Not to mention that SQL Server isn't somehow "copying" UNIX. Its performance and feature set blows most of the open-source databases out of the water, with only Postgres having superior features (but not performance).

The tooling around SQL Server is decent

If we're talking about the 1990s, SQL Server/Sybase ran on UNIX. Not to mention it's just a fork of Ingres lol

> There is still no equivalent to Microsoft Exchange, Group Policy, Enterprise PKI, and a bunch of other things in the Linux world.

Which also means fewer attack vectors.

Why yes, by leaving our computers off and not using them we are at significantly less risk than if we actually employed them to do meaningful work.

Not sure about the numbers, but there were also A LOT of NetWare servers serving Windows (and Mac) clients back in the day.

>It's like NIH maximalism.

UNIX was not an option for most people which is one of the reasons why NT killed the Unix workstation market and Microsoft software like IIS, MS SQL and Exchange was already established when Linux gained mainstream adoption.

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